posted on Feb, 20 2008 @ 12:31 AM
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - Sensitive detectors that may help find habitable planets orbiting distant stars as part of NASA's Kepler Mission are
undergoing tests at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Scheduled to launch in February 2009, the Kepler Mission will measure tiny variations in the brightness of stars to find planets that pass in front of
them during their orbits. During these passes or "transits" the planets will slightly decrease the star's brightness. The detectors are similar to
the image detectors found in a digital camera, but much more sensitive.
"This is a major milestone for the Kepler mission," said David Koch, deputy principal investigator for the Kepler Mission. "We will use hardware
identical to what we will be flying on Kepler in the test bed at Ames. We will have the ability to create transits of a star so that we can see the
change in the star's brightness. By simulating transits, we will be able to demonstrate that the flight hardware will work," Koch explained.
"We expect to find dozens of planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars that are terrestrial size, rocky planets, similar to Earth," said
William Borucki, Kepler's science principal investigator. "We will learn whether Earths are common or rare in our galaxy."
In space, the array of detectors will be covered with sapphire field-flattener lenses and use a telescope, which Borucki said will search a region of
sky 30,000 times larger that the Hubble Space Telescope is able to observe.
Read complete article here
What if we find hundreds of earth like rocky planets with atmosphere and right distance from their stars? how exciting it will be? I am sure next
thing we will be doing is, sending some robots to those planets to find whats going on :-)