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Mars Base

2013 in science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

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scibyte114 2013YearInReview

shared by Mars Base on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Morocco in 2011, and report that it is a new type of Mars rock with an unusually high water content.[8][9][10] American researchers state that a gene associated with active personality traits is also linked to
  • Astronomers affiliated with the Kepler space observatory announce the discovery of KOI-172.02, an Earth-like exoplanet candidate which orbits a star similar to the Sun in the habitable zone
  • 13 January – Massachusetts doctors invent a pill-sized medical scanner that can be safely swallowed by patients, allowing the esophagus to be more easily scanned for disease
  • ...101 more annotations...
  • 17 January – NASA announces that the Kepler space observatory has developed a reaction wheel issue
  • 2 January A study by Caltech astronomers reports that the Milky Way Galaxy contains at least one planet per sta
  • 3 January
  • 8 January
  • 20 January – Scientists prove that quadruple-helix DNA is present in human cells
  • 25 January
  • An international team of scientists develops a functional light-based "tractor beam", which allows individual cells to be selected and moved at will. The invention could have broad applications in medicine and microbiology
  • 30 January – South Korea conducts its first successful orbital launch
  • 6 February
  • Astronomers report that 6% of all dwarf stars – the most common stars in the known universe – may host Earthlike planets
  • Scientists discover live bacteria in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Whillans
  • American scientists finish drilling down to the subglacial Lake Whillans, which is buried around 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) under the Antarctic ice
  • 10 February NASA's Curiosity Mars rover uses its onboard drill to obtain the first deep rock sample ever retrieved from the surface of another plane
  • 15 February A 10-ton meteoroid impacts in Chelyabinsk, Russia, producing a powerful shockwave and injuring over 1,000 people
  • 28 February
  • Astronomers make the first direct observation of a protoplanet forming in a disk of gas and dust around a distant sta
  • A third radiation belt is discovered around the Eart
  • 1 March – Boston Dynamics demonstrates an updated version of its BigDog military robot
  • 3 March – American scientists report that they have cured HIV in an infant by giving the child a course of antiretroviral drugs very early in its life. The previously HIV-positive child has reportedly exhibited no HIV symptoms since its treatment, despite having no further medication for a year
  • researchers replace 75 percent of an injured patient's skull with a precision 3D-printed polymer replacement implant. In future, damaged bones may routinely be replaced with custom-manufactured implants
  • 7 March
  • A study concludes that heart disease was common among ancient mummies
  • 11 March
  • 12 March NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence that conditions on Mars were once suitable for microbial life after analyzing the first drilled sample of Martian rock, "John Klein" rock at Yellowknife Bay in Gale Crater. The rover detected water, carbon dioxide, oxygen, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, chloromethane and dichloromethane. Related tests found results consistent with the presence of smectite clay minerals
  • 14 March CERN scientists confirm, with a very high degree of certainty, that a new particle identified by the Large Hadron Collider in July 2012 is the long-sought Higgs boson
  • 18 March
  • NASA reports evidence from the Curiosity rover on Mars of mineral hydration, likely hydrated calcium sulfate, in several rock samples, including the broken fragments of "Tintina" rock and "Sutton Inlier" rock as well as in the veins and nodules in other rocks like "Knorr" rock and "Wernicke" rock.[177] Analysis using the rover's DAN instrument provided evidence of subsurface water, amounting to as much as 4% water content, down to a depth of 60 cm
  • 27 March – A potential new weight loss method is discovered, after a 20% weight reduction was achieved in mice simply by having their gut microbes altered.
  • NASA scientists report that hints of dark matter may have been detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
  • 3 April
  • 15 April A functional lab-grown kidney is successfully transplanted into a live rat in Massachusetts General Hospital
  • 18 April – NASA announces the discovery of three new Earthlike exoplanets – Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-69c – in the habitable zones of their respective host stars, Kepler-62 and Kepler-69. The new exoplanets, which are considered prime candidates for possessing liquid water and thus potentially life, were identified using the Kepler spacecraft
  • 21 April The Antares rocket, a commercial launch vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation, successfully conducts its maiden flight
  • After years of unpowered glide tests, Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo hybrid spaceplane successfully conducts its first rocket-powered fligh
  • 29 April
  • 1 May IBM scientists release A Boy and His Atom, the smallest stop-motion animation ever created, made by manipulating individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunnelling microscope
  • A new study finds that children whose parents suck on their pacifiers have fewer allergies later in life
  • NASA reports that a reaction wheel on the Kepler space observatory may be malfunctioning and may result in the premature termination of the observatory's search for Earth-like
  • 15 May
  • 16 May Water dating back 2.6 billion years, by far the oldest ever found, is discovered in a Canadian mine
  • 27 May Four-hundred-year-old bryophyte specimens left behind by retreating glaciers in Canada are brought back to life in the laboratory
  • 29 May
  • Russian scientists announce the discovery of mammoth blood and well-preserved muscle tissue from an adult female specimen in Siberia
  • A new treatment to "reset" the immune system of multiple sclerosis patients is reported to reduce their reactivity to myelin by 50 to 75 percent
  • 4 June
  • During the Shenzhou 10 mission, Chinese astronauts deliver the country's first public video broadcast from the orbiting Tiangong-1 space laboratory
  • 20 June
  • China's Shenzhou 10 manned spacecraft returns safely to Earth, having conducted China's longest manned space mission to date
  • 26 June
  • 20 June
  • 20 June
  • 6 July
  • Scientists report that a wide variety of microbial life exists in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok, which has been buried in ice for around 15 million years. Samples of the lake's water obtained by drilling were found to contain traces of DNA from over 3,000 tiny organisms
  • 15 July
  • ASA engineers successfully test a rocket engine with a fully 3D-printed injector
  • 19 July
  • NASA scientists publish the results of a new analysis of the atmosphere of Mars, reporting a lack of methane around the landing site of the Curiosity rover
  • Earth is photographed from the outer solar system. NASA's Cassini spacecraft releases images of the Earth and Moon taken from the orbit of Saturn
  • 29 July – Astronomers discover the first exoplanet orbiting a brown dwarf, 6,000 light years from Earth
  • exoplanet
  • 7 January
  • Astronomers
  • report that "at least 17 billion" Earth-sized exoplanets are estimated to reside in the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 20 February
  • NASA reports the discovery of Kepler-37b, the smallest exoplanet yet known, around the size of Earth's Moon
  • 10 June
  • Scientists report that the earlier claims of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a star close to our Solar System, may not be supported by astronomical evidence
  • 25 June – In an unprecedented discovery, astronomers detect three potentially Earthlike exoplanets orbiting a single star in the Gliese 667
  • 11 July For the first time, astronomers determine the true colour of a distant exoplanet. HD 189733 b, a searing-hot gas giant, is said to be a vivid blue colour, most likely due to clouds of silica in its atmosphere
  • NASA announces that the failing Kepler space observatory may never fully recover. New missions are being considered
  • 15 August
  • Phase I clinical trials of SAV001 – the first and only preventative HIV vaccine – have been successfully completed with no adverse effects in all patients. Antibody production was greatly boosted after vaccination
  • 3 September
  • 12 September NASA announces that Voyager I has officially left the Solar System, having travelled since 1977
  • NASA scientists report the Mars Curiosity rover detected "abundant, easily accessible" water (1.5 to 3 weight percent) in soil samples
  • 26 September
  • In addition, the rover found two principal soil types: a fine-grained mafic type and a locally derived, coarse-grained felsic type
  • mafic
  • as associated with hydration of the amorphous phases of the soi
  • perchlorates, the presence of which may make detection of life-related organic molecules difficult, were found at the Curiosity rover landing site
  • earlier at the more polar site of the Phoenix lander) suggesting a "global distribution of these salts
  • Astronomers have created the first cloud map of an exoplanet, Kepler-7b
  • 30 September
  • 8 October The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"
  • 16 October Russian authorities raise a large fragment, 654 kg (1,440 lb) total weight, of the Chelyabinsk meteor, a Near-Earth asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013, from the bottom of Chebarkul lake.
  • Researchers have shown that a fundamental reason for sleep is to clean the brain of toxins. This is achieved by brain cells shrinking to create gaps between neurons, allowing fluid to wash through
  • 17 October
  • 22 October – Astronomers have discovered the 1,000th known exoplanet
  • 4 November - Astronomers report, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting sun-like stars
  • 5 November – India launches its first Mars probe, Mangalyaan
  • The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has made the first discovery of very high energy neutrinos on Earth which had originated from beyond our Solar System
  • 21 November
  • 1 December – China launches the Chang'e 3 lunar rover mission, with a planned landing on December 16
  • 3 December – The Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence of water in the atmospheres of five distant exoplanets: HD 209458b, XO-1b, WASP-12b, WASP-17b and WASP-19b
  • 9 December NASA scientists report that the planet Mars had a large freshwater lake (which could have been a hospitable environment for microbial life) based on evidence from the Curiosity rover studying Aeolis Palus near Mount Sharp in Gale Crater
  • 12 December NASA announces, based on studies with the Hubble Space Telescope, that water vapor plumes were detected on Europa, moon of Jupiter
  • 14 December – The unmanned Chinese lunar rover Chang'e 3 lands on the Moon, making China the third country to achieve a soft landing there
  • 18 December
  • nomers have spotted what appears to be the first known "exomoon", located 1,800 light years away
  • 20 December – NASA reports that the Curiosity rover has successfully upgraded, for the third time since landing, its software programs and is now operating with version 11. The new software is expected to provide the rover with better robotic arm and autonomous driving abilities. Due to wheel wear, a need to drive more carefully, over the rough terrain the rover is currently traveling on its way to Mount Sharp, was also reported
Mars Base

Kepler Team Finds System with Two Potentially Habitable Planets - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-potentially-habitable-planets

scibyte91 scibyte92 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Kepler mission has found a planetary system with two small, potentially rocky planets that lie within the habitable zone of their star
  • Kepler-62, is a bit smaller and cooler than our Sun, and is home to a five-planet system
  • Two of the worlds, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are the smallest exoplanets yet found in a habitable zone, and they might both be covered in water or ice, depending on what kind of atmosphere they might have
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The curves show the mass-radius-relation (average density) for different types of planets
  • The blue line indicates
  • planets made mostly (75%) of water, the black line that of planets like our Earth that consist almost exclusively of rock (
  • estimate of their mass places them in a region (blue areas) where it is highly probable for them to be earth-like planets, that is: planets with a solid (if possibly covered in water) surface
  • the empirical habitable zone, liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet if that planet has sufficient cloud cover. In the narrow habitable zone, liquid water can exist on the surface even without the presence of a cloud cover
  • while the sizes of Kepler 62e and 62f are known, their mass and densities are not.
  • every planet found in their size range so far has been rocky, like Earth
  • Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy
  • life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us
  • Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth according to computer models
  • More distant Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean
  • Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions
  • Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly
  • the two would exhibit distinctly different colors and make our search for signatures of life easier on such planets in the near future
  • planets in the habitable zone were until now discovered by what is known as the radial velocity method
  • gives you a lower limit for the planet’s mass, but no information about its radius
  • What makes Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f so exciting is
  • We know their radius, which indicates that these are indeed rocky planets, and they orbit their star in the habitable zone
  • makes it difficult to assess whether or not a planet is rocky, like the Earth. A small radius (less than 2 Earth radii), on the other hand, is a strong indicator that a planet around is indeed rocky – unless we are talking about a planet around a very young star
Mars Base

Smallest Exoplanet Yet Discovered by 'Listening' to a Sun-like Star - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...y-listening-to-a-sun-like-star

scibyte83 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Scientists have discovered a new planet orbiting a Sun-like star, and the exoplanet is the smallest yet found in data from the Kepler mission
  • Kepler-37b, is smaller than Mercury, but slightly larger than Earth’s Moon
  • discovery came from a collaboration between Kepler scientists and a consortium of international researchers who employ asteroseismology
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • measuring oscillations in the star’s brightness caused by continuous star-quakes, and turning those tiny variations in the star’s light into sounds
  • The bigger the star, the lower the frequency, or ‘pitch’ of its song
  • The measurements made by the astroseismologists allowed the Kepler research team to more accurately measure the tiny Kepler-37b
  • revealing two other planets in the same planetary system: one slightly smaller than Earth and one twice as large
  • Kepler-37b is very likely a rocky planet with no atmosphere or water, similar to Mercury
  • “The detection of such a small planet shows for the first time that stellar systems host planets much smaller as well as much larger than anything we see in our own Solar System.”
  • host star, Kepler-37, is about 210 light-years from Earth
  • All three planets orbit the star at less than the distance Mercury is to the Sun
  • Kepler-37b orbits every 13 days at less than one-third Mercury’s distance from the Sun
  • estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Kelvin
  • hot enough to melt the zinc in a penny
  • Kepler-37c and Kepler-37d, orbit every 21 days and 40 days, respectively
  • The size of the star must be known in order to measure the planet’s size accurately
  • scientists examined sound waves generated by the boiling motion beneath the surface of the star
  • The technique for stellar seismology is analogous to how geologists use seismic waves generated by earthquakes to probe the interior structure of Earth
  • sound waves travel into the star and bring information back up to the surface
  • waves cause oscillations that Kepler observes as a rapid flickering of the star’s brightness
  • barely discernible, high-frequency oscillations in the brightness of small stars are the most difficult to measure
  • why most objects previously subjected to asteroseismic analysis are larger than the Sun
  • Kepler-37 has a radius just three-quarters of the Sun
  • the radius of the star is known to 3 percent accuracy, which translates to exceptional accuracy in the planet’s size.
  • this discovery took a long time to verify, as the signature of this very small exoplanet was hard to confirm
  • Kepler is sending astronomers photometry data that’s “probably the best we’ll see in our lifetimes
  • uncovered a planet smaller than any in our solar system orbiting one of the few stars that is both bright and quiet, where signal detection was possible
Mars Base

Odd Alien Planets So Close Together They See 'Planetrise' | Kepler Mission | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/s-close-orbits-planetrise.html

scibyte52 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have discovered two alien planets around the same star whose orbits come so close together that each rises in the night sky of its sister world
  • ,200 light-years from Earth
  • differ greatly in size and composition but come within just 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) of each other, closer than any other pair of planets known,
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Kepler-36b, appears to be a rocky "super-Earth" 4.5 times as massive as our planet
  • Kepler-36c, is a gaseous, Neptune-size world about eight times as massive as Earth
  • planets meet up every 97 days in a conjunction that would make each dramatically visible in the other's sky.
  • At their closest approach, the two planets are separated by five times the distance between the Earth and the moon
  • as different in density as Earth and Saturn
  • Kepler-36b and c are actually more like 20 times closer together than any two planets in our neck of the woods
  • Kepler-36c, which is about 3.7 times wider than Earth, likely has a rocky core surrounded by a substantial atmosphere filled with lots of hydrogen and helium
  • Kepler-36b, on the other hand, is a super-Earth just 1.5 times wider than our planet. Iron likely constitutes about 30 percent of its mass, water around 15 percent and atmospheric hydrogen and helium less than 1 percent
  • Kepler-36c orbits once every 16 days, at an average distance of 12 million miles (19 million km). Kepler-36b orbits each 14 days and sits about 11 million miles (18 million km) from the star.
  • Kepler-36b probably formed relatively close to the star
  • Kepler-36c likely took shape farther out
  • large-scale migrations that can bring initially far-flung planets much closer together
  • Kepler-36b probably sporting lava flows on its surface
  • orbit roughly three times closer to their host star, known as Kepler-36a, than the hellishly hot planet Mercury does to our sun
  • Kepler-36a is likely a bit hotter than our star
Mars Base

Kepler Explorer app puts distant planets at your fingertips - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...lorer-app-distant-planets.html

scibyte41 Kepler app

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Kepler Explorer app puts distant planets at your fingertips
  • Kepler Explorer challenges users to design a planet that matches the Kepler data
  • Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • innovative app for iPads and iPhones
  • available for free
  • brought together faculty and students in astrophysics, art, and technology for a summer institute last year
  • team quickly settled on the idea to create an app, and also developed it into an exhibit that provides additional information and shows the app's output on a large screen
  • scheduled for long-term installation in the Lick Observatory visitors gallery later this month
  • Kepler Explorer starts with drop-down menus listing all the Kepler-discovered planetary systems, plus our own solar system
  • selected system is displayed in a view that shows the planet or planets in their orbits around the host star
  • Shown in real time the planets look motionless, but moving a slider increases the speed until the planets zip around their star
  • lets users zoom in and move around the system, and tapping on an individual planet brings it up for further exploration. Another view shows the relative sizes of the individual planets compared to their host star
  • when viewing individual planets
  • The user can manipulate the composition of the planet and its atmosphere and see which mixtures of components (iron, rock, water, and hydrogen) are consistent with Kepler's observations
  • represents graphically the type of in-depth analysis that Fortney does for the Kepler Mission
  • the app allows anyone to explore the properties of many different planets very quickly
  • only measures the radius of a planet, or how big it is. In most cases, the mass of the planet is unknown
  • there may be different combinations of components that result in a planet of a given size
  • 's interactive graphics show how this works
  • sliders for different components and how they are partitioned in the core and the atmosphere, and as you move the sliders the image of the planet grows and shrinks, based on hundreds of calculations
  • the app tells you when the size of your planet matches the observations
  • calculations involved took hours of computer time, but the results are stored in tables so the app can use them on the fly.
Mars Base

NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Spacecraft Recovering from Glitch | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-kepler-spacecraft-glitch.html

scibyte80 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 30 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • NASA's Kepler space telescope has resumed its search for alien planets after resting for 10 days to work out kinks in its attitude control system, mission officials announced
  • Jan. 29
  • Kepler went into a protective "safe mode" on Jan. 17 after engineers detected elevated friction levels in one of its reaction wheels
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Engineers spun the wheels down to zero speed, hoping the break would redistribute lubricant and bring the friction back down to normal
  • That phase is now over and Kepler is back in action, though it will take time to determine if the problem is solved
  • "During the 10-day resting safe mode, daily health and status checks with the spacecraft using NASA's Deep Space Network were normal."
  • When Kepler launched in March 2009, it had four reaction wheels — three for immediate use, and one spare
  • one wheel (known as number two) failed in July 2012, so a major problem with the currently glitchy wheel (called number four) could spell the end of the $600 million Kepler mission.
  • Over the next month, the engineering team will review the performance of reaction wheel #4 before, during and after the safe mode to determine the efficacy of the rest operation
  • The wheel has acted up before without causing serious problems
  • with a variety of friction signatures, none of which look like reaction wheel #2, and all of which disappeared on their own after a time
Mars Base

NASA Space Telescopes Find Patchy Clouds on Exotic World - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - 0 views

www.jpl.nasa.gov/...news.php

scibyte105 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet
  • known as Kepler-7b
  • Previous studies from Spitzer have resulted in temperature maps of planets orbiting other stars
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • this is the first look at cloud structures on a distant world.
  • observing this planet with Spitzer and Kepler for more than three years, we were able to produce a very low-resolution 'map' of this giant, gaseous planet
  • wouldn't expect to see oceans or continents on this type of world, but we detected a clear, reflective signature that we interpreted as clouds
  • Kepler-7b was one of the first
  • Kepler's visible-light observations of Kepler-7b's moon-like phases led to a rough map of the planet that showed a bright spot on its western hemisphere
  • data were not enough on their own to decipher whether the bright spot was coming from clouds or heat
  • Spitzer Space Telescope played a crucial role in answering this question
  • Spitzer can fix its gaze at a star system as a planet orbits around the star, gathering clues about the planet's atmosphere
  • Spitzer's ability to detect infrared light means it was able to measure Kepler-7b's temperature, estimating it to be between 1,500 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 and 1,300 Kelvin).
  • relatively cool for a planet that orbits so close to its star -- within 0.06 astronomical units (one astronomical unit is the distance from Earth and the sun)
  • , too cool to be the source of light Kepler observed.
  • Instead, they determined, light from the planet's star is bouncing off cloud tops located on the west side of the planet.
  • Kepler-7b reflects much more light than most giant planets we've found, which we attribute to clouds in the upper atmosphere
  • the cloud patterns on this planet do not seem to change much over time -- it has a remarkably stable climate
  • With Spitzer and Kepler together, we have a multi-wavelength tool for getting a good look at planets that are trillions of miles away
  • exoplanet science
  • moving beyond just detecting exoplanets, and into the exciting science of understanding them
  • observations of Kepler-7b previously revealed that it is one of the puffiest planets known: if it could somehow be placed in a tub of water, it would float
  • found to whip around its star in just less than five days
  • a fully rendered 3D visualization tool, available for download at http://eyes.nasa.gov/exoplanets
  • program is updated daily with the latest findings from NASA's Kepler mission and ground-based observatories around the world as they search for planets
Mars Base

Astronomers find a new type of planet: The 'mega-Earth' - 0 views

phys.org/...onomers-planet-mega-earth.html

scibyte134 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 05 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Astronomers announced
  • that they have discovered a new type of planet - a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth
  • Theorists believed such a world couldn't form because anything so hefty would grab hydrogen gas as it grew and become a Jupiter-like gas giant
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • This planet, though, is all solids and much bigger than previously discovered "super-Earths," making it a "mega-Earth."
  • Kepler-10c, circles a sunlike star once every 45 days
  • It is located about 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco
  • The system also hosts a 3-Earth-mass "lava world," Kepler-10b, in a remarkably fast, 20-hour orbit
  • Kepler-10c was originally spotted by NASA's Kepler spacecraft.
  • By measuring the amount of dimming, astronomers can calculate the planet's physical size or diameter
  • Kepler can't tell whether a planet is rocky or gassy
  • Kepler-10c was known to have a diameter
  • , 2.3 times as large as Earth
  • This suggested it fell into a category of planets known as mini-Neptunes, which have thick, gaseous envelopes
  • The team used the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands to measure the mass of Kepler-10c
  • They found that it weighed 17 times as much as Earth - far more than expected.
  • This showed that Kepler-10c must have a dense composition of rocks and other solids.
  • Planet formation theories have a difficult time explaining how such a large, rocky world could develop
  • The early universe contained only hydrogen and helium
  • Heavier elements needed to make rocky planets, like silicon and iron, had to be created
  • When those stars exploded
  • scattered
  • through space, which then could
  • later generations of stars and planets
  • This process should have taken billions of years. However, Kepler-10c shows that the universe was able to form such huge rocks even during the time when heavy elements were scarce.
  • tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks
  • This research implies that astronomers shouldn't rule out old stars when they search for Earth-like planets
  • if old stars can host rocky Earths too, then we have a better chance of locating potentially habitable worlds in our cosmic neighborhood
  • The Kepler-10 system is about 11 billion years old, which means it formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang
  • It's massive enough to have held onto
  • its atmosphere
  • if it ever had it
Mars Base

Planets Found by Kepler Spacecraft Likely Larger Than Thought | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/anets-larger-than-thought.html

scibyte97 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 05 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A large number of worlds found by NASA's Kepler alien planet-hunting space telescope are probably significantly larger than scientists previously estimated
  • a new study suggests
  • The Kepler Space Telescope has spotted more than 2,700 potential
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • researchers made detailed follow-up observations of 300 of the stars Kepler found likely to be harboring exoplanets
  • One of the main findings of this initial work is that our observations indicate that most of the stars we observed are slightly larger than previously thought and one quarter of them are at least 35 percent larger
  • any planets orbiting these stars must be larger and hotter as well
  • By implication, these new results reduce the number of candidate Earth-size planet analogues detected by Kepler
  • Determination of accurate stellar sizes allows astronomers to more accurately identify which exoplanets are Earth analogs
  • total
  • stars observed by
  • team host more than 360 Kepler planet candidates, as some of the stars were found to have more than one satellite
Mars Base

Kepler Planet-Hunting Mission in Jeopardy - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...net-hunting-mission-in-jepardy

scibyte94 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 16 May 13 - No Cached
  • NASA’s Kepler telescope has lost its ability to precisely point toward stars
  • One of the reaction wheels –devices which enable the spacecraft to aim in different directions without firing thrusters – has failed
  • last year reaction wheel #2 failed, and now #4 has failed
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Kepler
  • needs at least three reaction wheels to be able to point precisely enough to hunt for planets orbiting distant stars
  • that doesn’t require such precise pointing abilities
  • Last year, NASA had approved an extended mission for Kepler through 2016
  • Initially, they did see some movement on the wheel
  • but it quickly went back
  • have a few things to try
  • get wheel #4 working again
  • they are currently using thrusters to stabilize the spacecraft, and in its current mode, the onboard fuel will last for several months
  • a “Point Rest State,”
  • would extend the fuel to last a period of several years
  • where we can park the vehicle
  • Point Rest State is a loosely-pointed, thruster-controlled state that minimizes fuels usage while providing a continuous X-band communication downlink
  • software to execute that state was loaded to the spacecraft last week
  • the team completed the upload of the parameters the software will use
  • there is the possibility of the wheel running in the opposite direction, but running the wheel backward would mean they would need to use more thruster fuel
  • reaction wheels try to balance the forces from the solar pressure, that’s what forces a wheel to run
  • Earlier this year, elevated friction was detected in reaction wheel #4
  • even if the Kepler spacecraft is unable to make more observations, there are still terabytes of data to pore over
  • have two years of data that has yet to be searched through
Mars Base

Discovered! Most Earth-Like Alien Planet & 2 Other Possibly Habitable Worlds | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/e-alien-planets-discovery.html

scibyte91 scibyte92 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The third potentially habitable planet, called Kepler-69c, is 1.7 times bigger than Earth and orbits a star similar to our own
  • It's the smallest world ever found in the habitable zone of a sunlike star
  • scientists rolled out seven new exoplanets today — five in the Kepler-62 system and two in Kepler-69
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Kepler-62e and f take 122 and 267 days, respectively, to complete one orbit around their star, which is just 20 percent as bright as the sun
  • The telescope needs to observe three transits to flag a planet candidate, so detecting a potentially habitable world in a relatively distant orbit can take several years
  • Kepler cannot search for signs of life on worlds like Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Kepler-69c, but the telescope is paving the way for future missions that should do just that
Mars Base

News | SDSU | Discovery Creates New Class of Planetary Systems - 0 views

newscenter.sdsu.edu/...news.aspx

scibyte29 Kepler multimedia circumbinary

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Using data from NASA’s Kepler Mission
  • astronomers announced the discovery of two new transiting “circumbinary” planet systems — planets that orbit two stars.
  • two new planets, named Kepler-34 b and Kepler-35 b, are both gaseous Saturn-size planets
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  • Kepler-34 b orbits its two sun-like stars every 289 days, and the stars themselves orbit and eclipse each other every 28 days.
  • eclipses allow a very precise determination of the stars
  • Kepler-35 b revolves about a pair of smaller stars (80 and 89 percent of the sun’s mass) every 131 days, and the stars orbit and eclipse one another every 21 days
  • Kepler-34 at 4,900 light-years from Earth
  • Kepler-35 at 5,400 light-years
  • among the most distant planets discovered.
Mars Base

NASA Nearly Doubles Discovery of Known Planets Without Active Kepler Space Telescope - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...ithout-active-kepler-space.htm

scibyte122 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The Kepler Space Telescope has been inactive since May of 2013, but the probe's data has led astronomer's to discover 715 new planets
  • The 715 new planets are said to be distributed among 305 different star systems, and the number of Earth-sized planets increased by 400%
  • four of the newly discovered planets are about 2.5 times wider than Earth
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • he number of known planets beyond our solar system has increased to almost 1,700
  • Kepler 174d, Kepler 296f, Kepler 298d, and Kepler 309c are also said to be located in a habitable zone where water may exist in liquid form
Mars Base

Gone perhaps, but Kepler won't soon be forgotten | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._Kepler_wont_soon_be_forgotten

scibyte95 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 13 - No Cached
  • When scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scheduled a conference called “Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era,” they figured that era would still be several years away
  • . When
  • Kepler into space
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  • astronomers knew that the galaxy contained at least 350 exoplanets, nearly all of them the size of Jupiter or larger
  • Kepler’s then spent four years
  • added nearly 3,000 planets
  • It will take at least several weeks before they beam commands up to the $600-million telescope, and they admit that a fix is a long shot.
  • Kepler engineers
  • strategizing about how to remotely repair one of two broken reaction wheels that precisely point the telescope
  • astronomers are convinced that the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of planets, roughly one for every star, with at least 17 billion of them Earth-sized
  • NASA’s next exoplanet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is scheduled for a 2017 launch
  • Whereas Kepler has fixed its gaze on distant stars, TESS will focus on bright, nearby stars so that powerful telescopes like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to probe the atmospheres of planets that TESS discovers
  • s TESS
  • while less sensitive than Kepler, will nonetheless uncover plenty of planets in our neighborhood, including a handful of Earth-sized worlds
  • Astronomers
  • Other astronomers
  • are still optimistic. They have a year of data from the telescope left to analyze
  • quite possibly including an Earth-sized planet orbiting a sunlike star at a distance suitable for life
  • Astronomers hope to pair size measurements of planets observed by telescopes such as TESS with mass readings from ground-based scopes that look for subtle wobbles in stars’ motion caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.
  • Several years ago
  • radial velocity, could pick out only hulking planets that delivered a hard yank to their stars
  • lately the technology has improved so drastically that in October 2012, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher instrument
  • spotted what appears to be a planet only slightly heavier than Earth tightly orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a sunlike star a mere 4.4 light-years away
  • Kepler’s main goal was to determine the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy
  • have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, but
  • actually determining that number
Mars Base

Most Earthlike planets yet seen bring Kepler closer to its holy grail | Atom & Cosmos |... - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...epler_closer_to_its_holy_grail

scibyte91 scibyte92 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • five-planet system around a star called Kepler-62, some 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Lyra
  • Astronomers found the planets by analyzing nearly three years’ worth of data
  • Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are far more accommodating. They are 1.6 and 1.4 times the diameter of Earth
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  • early evidence supports the optimistic view that at least 62f is rocky
  • biggest uncertainty about both planets is their composition
  • an astronomer at the University of Washington
  • not involved in the research
  • Kepler-62e
  • may be too close to its star – and therefore too hot – to sustain life
  • if 62e is a rocky planet, it’s almost certainly tidally locked with its star, with one half of its surface always illuminated and the other perpetually dark
  • Kepler 62 is about two-thirds the size of the sun and several hundred degrees Celsius cooler
  • Finding planets in the habitable zones of larger stars
  • harder because those planets have relatively long orbits and barely cast a shadow as they pass across the faces of their suns
  • another study
  • led by
  • NASA Ames Research Center
  • identified two planets around a sunlike star called Kepler-69, some 2,700 light-years away
  • One of the planets is 1.7 times the size of Earth and teeters on the inner edge of the habitable zone
  • probably too hot for life
  • almost certainly a super-Venus rather than a super-Earth
  • even a planet 75 percent larger than Earth is potentially habitable
  • Next-generation missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which NASA approved earlier this month for launch in 2017, will take on the task of finding nearer planets that astronomers can study in depth
Mars Base

Planet-Hunting Kepler Spacecraft Shut Down Temporarily After Glitch | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/cope-alien-planets-glitch.html

scibyte78 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The Kepler telescope went into safe mode on Jan. 17 for a planned 10 days, during which time the telescope's reaction wheels — spinning devices used by the observatory to maintain its position in space —will be rested
  • after researchers detected an unexpected increase in the amount of torque needed to rotate
  • "Resting the wheels provides an opportunity to redistribute internal lubricant, potentially returning the friction to normal levels," Kepler officials
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  • Once the 10-day rest period ends, the team will recover the spacecraft from this resting safe mode and return to science operations
  • When the Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009, it had four functional reaction wheels — three for immediate use, plus one spare
  • One of the wheels failed last
Mars Base

Kepler Mission Extended to 2016 - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...epler-mission-extended-to-2016

scibyte41 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 03 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Artist concept of Kepler in space. Credit: NASA/JPL
  • NASA’s tight budget
  • Anxieties were rampant about one mission in particular, the very fruitful exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission, as several years of observations are required in order for Kepler to confirm a repeated orbit as a planet transits its star
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  • Additionally, missions such as Hubble, Fermi and Swift will receive continued funding
  • only mission that took a hit was the Spitzer infrared telescope, which – as of now — will be closed out in 2015, which is sooner than requested.
  • Senior Review of missions takes place every two years
  • In the Review, missions are ranked as which are most successful
  • previous Senior Reviews led to the removal of funding for the weakest 10-20% of extended missions
  • Hubble Space Telescope will continue at the currently funded levels
  • Chandra will also continue at current levels, but its Guest Observer budget will actually be increased to account for decreases in Fiscal Year 2011
  • Fermi operations are extended through FY16, with a 10 percent per year reduction starting in FY14.
  • Swift and Kepler mission operations are extended through FY16, including funding for data analysis.
  • Planck will support one year extended operations of the Low Frequency Instrument (LFI).
  • Spitzer’s operations are extended through FY14 with closeout in FY15
  • U.S. science support of Suzaku is extended to March 2015.
  • Funding for U.S. support of XMM-Newton is extended through March 2015.
  • all FY15-FY16 decisions are for planning purposes and they will be revisited in the 2014 Senior Review
Mars Base

NASA - A New Class of Planetary Systems - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...epler-35-artist-concept-2.html

scibyte29 Kepler twin star

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  •     Kepler    >    Multimedia    >    Images
Mars Base

Alien Planet Archive Now Open to World | NASA Kepler Spacecraft | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/lanet-nasa-kepler-website.html

scibyte78 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Researchers are now posting all exoplanet sightings by the Kepler observatory into a single, comprehensive website called the "NASA Exoplanet Archive."
  • Instead of going through the long planet confirmation process before making data publicly available
  • So the day we know about the list, the archive knows about the list. And then everybody, including us, can work on that list. But that list is dynamic so if we, or a community person, makes an observation and says, 'Hey, I looked at this planet candidate but it's really an eclipsing binary,' then that entry in the archive will be changed."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The archive has information about the size, orbital period and other metrics of any possible planet discovered and investigated by Kepler
  • Planet Hunters, a collective of amateur astronomers, recently found 42 new alien planets using Kepler data that was publicly available prior to the launch of the new archive system.
Chris Fisher

NASA's Kepler Announces 11 Planetary Systems Hosting 26 Planets - Mainpage - 0 views

www.naturenplanet.com/...-planetary-systems-hosting.htm

nasa Kepler planets

shared by Chris Fisher on 25 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, the star.
  • The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun.
  • Chris Fisher on 25 Mar 12
     
    NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, the star. 
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