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Mars Base

Planet-Hunting Kepler Mission Extended Through 2016 | Alien Planets | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/lanet-kepler-mission-2016.html

scibyte41 Kepler exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Kepler mission, which has discovered more than 2,300 potential alien planets to date,
  • slated to run out this November
  • launched in March 2009 on
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • finding 61 confirmed alien planets to date
  • members have estimated that the vast majority of these candidates — 80 percent or more — will likely end up being the real deal.
  • artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. CREDIT: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
  • Seeing more transits will also increase the signal-to-noise ratio for closer-in planets, allowing more of them to be detected, researchers have said
Mars Base

NASA - Kepler Mission Manager Update - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...keplerm-20120401.html

scibyte43 Kepler aprilfool

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • For those inspired by Roger's look for the day, you can participate by adding a Johannes Kepler (the namesake of the mission) likeness to your personal photo and sharing with the NASA Kepler mission community on Facebook and Twitter.
  • identification of potentially habitable planets requires deep thought. To think deeply, we must dress as deep thinkers have dressed in the past. There is nothing that speaks of deep thought more plainly than a formal neck-ruff
Mars Base

Hobbled Kepler Space Telescope Now On The Hunt For A New Mission - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-on-the-hunt-for-a-new-mission

Kepler scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • NASA cannot recover the two failed reaction wheels that stopped Kepler from doing its primary science mission
  • the spacecraft, which is already working years past when its prime mission ceased in 2010, is still in great shape otherwise
  • could be anything from searching for asteroids to a technique called microlensing, which could show Jupiter-sized planets around other stars with the spacecraft’s more limited pointed ability
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • NASA is now considering other science missions
  • the health of the spacecraft, but it is so far listed as good (except for the two damaged reaction wheels).
  • There are limiting factors
  • radiation can degrade components over time, and a stray micrometeorid could (as a small chance) cause damage on the spacecraft
  • a state where the spacecraft uses as little fuel as possible
  • point rest state right now
  • will extend the fuel “budget” for years
  • unable to say just how many years yet
  • Another concern is NASA’s limited budget
  • Kepler has, so far, detected more than 2,700 candidate exoplanets orbiting distant stars, including many Earth-size planets that are within their star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form
  • NASA made several attempts to resurrect the wheels
  • follow-up spacecraft planned: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is expected to start around 2017 or 2018. It will look for alien planets in the brightest and closest stars in the entire sky, in locations that are (in relative terms) close to Earth.
Mars Base

A Sunny Outlook for NASA Kepler's Second Light | NASA - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...-for-nasa-keplers-second-light

scibyte110 scibyte111 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 26 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A repurposed Kepler Space telescope may soon start searching the sky again.
  • A new mission concept, dubbed K2, would continue Kepler's search for other worlds, and introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae
  • In May, the Kepler spacecraft lost the second of four gyroscope-like reaction wheels, which are used to precisely point the spacecraft, ending new data collection for the original mission
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  • required three functioning wheels to maintain the precision pointing necessary to detect the signal of small Earth-sized exoplanets
  • With the failure of a second reaction wheel, the spacecraft can no longer precisely point at the mission's original field of view. The culprit is none other than our own sun
  • pushes the spacecraft around
  • the pressure exerted when the photons of sunlight strike the spacecraft
  • Without a third wheel to help counteract the solar pressure, the spacecraft's ultra-precise pointing capability cannot be controlled in all directions.
  • Kepler mission and Ball Aerospace engineers have developed an innovative way of recovering pointing stability by maneuvering the spacecraft so that the solar pressure is evenly distributed across the surfaces of the spacecraft
  • To achieve this level of stability, the orientation of the spacecraft must be nearly parallel to its orbital path around the sun
  • This technique of using the sun as the 'third wheel' to control pointing is currently being tested on the spacecraft and early results are already coming i
  • During a pointing performance test in late October, a full frame image of the space telescope's full field of view was captured showing part of the constellation Sagittarius
  • Photons of light from a distant star field were collected over a 30-minute period and produced an image quality within five percent of the primary mission image quality
  • Additional testing is underway to demonstrate the ability to maintain this level of pointing control for days and weeks.
  • The K2 mission concept has been presented to NASA Headquarters
  • A decision to proceed to the 2014 Senior Review – a biannual assessment of operating missions – and propose for budget to fly K2 is expected by the end of 2013
  • For four years, the space telescope simultaneously and continuously monitored the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, recording a measurement every 30 minutes.
Mars Base

New Earth-Like Blazing Hot Planet 'Kepler-78b' Discovered - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...overed-an-impossible-world.htm

scibyte108 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • first known Earth-sized planet with an Earth-like density
  • diameter of 9,200 miles,
  • is 1.2 times the size of Earth and 1.7 times more massive than Earth and it is composed of iron and rock
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  • planet circles its star every eight and a half hours at a distance of less than one mile
  • one of tightest known orbit on record and due to this its formation is deemed as impossible and not suitable for life.
  • The scientists believe no planet can form so close to its star nor could it have moved to its current position.
  • Kepler-78b poses a challenge to theorists
  • When this planetary system was forming, the young star was larger than it is now.
  • the current orbit of Kepler-78b would have been inside the swollen star
  • The star of Kepler-78b is slightly smaller and less massive than the sun
  • Sun-like G-type star, which is  located 400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus
  • The exoplanet was discovered using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope
  • follow up observations were made using W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii
Mars Base

More Insight on How NASA Might Revive the Kepler Space Telescope - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ive-the-kepler-space-telescope

scibyte94 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 19 May 13 - No Cached
  • there’s still a year and a half’s worth of data in the pipeline that scientists will analyze to identify other candidate planets, and there will continue to be Kepler science discoveries for quite some time
  • There are two possible ways to salvage the spacecraft
  • they could try turning back on the reaction wheel that they shut off a year ago. It was putting metal on metal, and the friction was interfering with its operation
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • could see if the lubricant that is in there, having sat quietly, has redistributed itself, and maybe it will work
  • The other scheme,
  • this has never been tried, involves using thrusters and the solar pressure exerted on the solar panels to try and act as a third reaction wheel and provide additional pointing stability
  • Kepler carries a photometer, not a camera, that looks at the brightness of stars, and so its optics deliberately defocus light from stars to create a nice spread of light on the detector, which is not ideal for spotting asteroids
Mars Base

Tiny exoplanet smaller than Mercury: Smallest planet yet found outside solar system (Up... - 0 views

phys.org/...exoplanet-smaller-mercury.html

scibyte83 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The bigger the star, the lower the frequency, or 'pitch' of its song
  • The team determined Kepler-37's mass is about 80 percent the mass of our sun
  • That's the lowest mass star astronomers have been able to measure using oscillation data for an ordinary star
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  • Those measurements also allowed the main research team to more accurately measure the three planets orbiting Kepler-37, including the tiny Kepler-37b
  • Kepler-37b is about 80% the size of Mercury and is the first exoplanet to be found that is smaller than any planet in our own Solar System
  • 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."
Mars Base

Kepler finds first multi-planet system around a binary star - 0 views

phys.org/...-multi-planet-binary-star.html

scibyte61 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 29 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star
  • proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star
  • binary star in question is called Kepler-47
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • primary star is about the same mass as the Sun, and its companion is an M-dwarf star one-third its size
  • inner planet is three times the size of Earth and orbits the binary star every 49.5 days
  • outer planet is 4.6 times the size of Earth with an orbit of 303.2 days.
  • outer planet is the first planet found to orbit a binary star within the "habitable zone,"
  • the planet's size (about the same as Uranus) means that it is an icy giant, and not an abode for life
  • "The challenging thing is that this is a very faint star," Endl said, "about 6,000 times dimmer than can be seen with the naked eye."
  • The secondary star is too faint to measure
  • taking spectra of the system
  • These values, along with the Kepler eclipse and transit timings, were plugged into a model that calculated the relative sizes of all the bodies involved
Mars Base

Disintegrating Alien Planet Has Comet-Like Tail | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/n-planet-dust-tail-kepler.html

scibyte62 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 06 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have found a dusty tail streaming off a faraway alien planet, suggesting that the tiny, scorching-hot world is indeed falling apart.
  • In May, researchers announced the detection of a possibly distintegrating exoplanet, a roughly Mercury-size world being boiled away by the intense heat of its parent star
  • a different team has found strong evidence in support of the find
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  • Both studies used observations from NASA's Kepler space telescope
  • completing an orbit every 15 hours
  • surface temperatures estimated to be around 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,982 degrees Celsius).
  • predicted that the planet is likely surrounded by a huge veil of dust and gas
  • In the new study, a different team
  • affirms the existence of this planetary dust tail
  • found clear signals that
  • light is being scattered and absorbed by large amounts of dust.
  • Further work with different instruments could help nail down just what the planet is made of
  • By observing the dust clouds in different colors, something Kepler cannot do, we will be able to determine the amount and the composition of the dust and estimate its lifetime
  • "As the evaporation peels the planet like an onion, we can now see what used to be the inside of a planet."
Mars Base

NASA - NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...epler_Smallest_Exoplanets.html

scibyte29 Kepler exoplanet small

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • using data from NASA's Kepler mission
  • discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun
  • smallest is about the size of Mars
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • thought to be rocky like Earth, but orbit close to their star
  • too hot to be in the habitable zone
  • Kepler
  • continuously monitoring more than 150,000 stars
  • latest discovery comes from a team led by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena
  • used data publicly released by the Kepler mission, along with follow-up observations from the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii
  • measurements dramatically revised the sizes of the planets from what originally was estimated.
  • more similar to Jupiter and its moons in scale than any other planetary system
  • Jan. 11, 2012
Mars Base

First potentially habitable Earth-sized planet confirmed: It may have liquid water - 0 views

phys.org/...earth-sized-planet-liquid.html

scibyte127 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The first Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star has been confirmed by observations with both the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory
  • The initial discovery, made by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, is one of a handful of smaller planets found by Kepler and verified using large ground-based telescopes
  • his Earth-sized planet, one of five orbiting this star, which is cooler than the Sun, resides in a temperate region where water could exist in liquid form
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  • neither Kepler (nor any telescope) is currently able to directly spot an exoplanet of this size and proximity to its host star
  • can do is eliminate essentially all other possibilities so that the validity of these planets is really the only viable option
  • With such a small host star, the team employed a technique that eliminated the possibility that either a background star or a stellar companion could be mimicking what Kepler detected
  • the team obtained extremely high spatial resolution observations from the eight-meter Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai
  • using a technique called speckle imaging, as well as adaptive optics (AO) observations from the ten-meter Keck II telescope
  • The Gemini "speckle" data directly imaged the system to within about 400 million miles (about 4 AU, approximately equal to the orbit of Jupiter in our solar system) of the host star and confirmed that there were no other stellar size objects orbiting within this radius from the star
  • The host star, Kepler-186, is an M1-type dwarf star relatively close to our solar system, at about 500 light years and is in the constellation of Cygnus
  • The star is very dim, being over half a million times fainter than the faintest stars we can see with the naked eye
  • Five small planets have been found orbiting this star, four of which are in very short-period orbits and are very hot
  • Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (DSSI) on the Gemini North telescope
  • is a visiting instrument
  • works on a principle that utilizes multiple short exposures of an object to capture and remove the noise introduced by atmospheric turbulence producing images with extreme detail
Mars Base

Kepler wraps prime mission, begins extension - 0 views

phys.org/...r-prime-mission-extension.html

scibyte72 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 15 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • NASA is marking two milestones in the search for planets like Earth; the successful completion of the Kepler Space Telescope's three-and-a-half-year prime mission and the beginning of an extended mission that could last as long as four years.
  • identify more than 2,300 planet candidates and confirm more than 100 planets
  • hundreds of Earth-size planet candidates have been found
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  • Highlights from the prime mission
  • confirmed the discovery of the first planetary system with more than one planet transiting the same star
  • the discovery of the first unquestionably rocky planet outside the solar system
  • 1.4 times the size of Earth
  • confirmed the existence of a world with a double sunset
  • discoveries of six additional worlds orbiting double stars further demonstrated planets can form and persist in the environs of a double-star system
  • first planet in a habitable zone
  • December 2011
  • September 2011
  • February 2012
  • transiting planet candidates
  • total of 2,321
  • Recently
  • The joint effort of amateur astronomers and scientists led to the first reported case of a planet orbiting a double star
Mars Base

Tiny Worlds Around a Tiny Star (Infographic) | Smallest Alien Planets & KOI-961 Solar S... - 0 views

www.space.com/ets-tiny-star-infographic.html

scibyte29 exoplanet small Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 11 January 2012
  • astronomers announced the discovery of a miniature solar system made up of three tiny planets - all of them smaller than Earth
  • 130 light-years from Earth
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • using NASA's Kepler
Mars Base

Malfunction Could Mark the End of NASA's Kepler Mission - ScienceInsider - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...tion-could-mark-the-end-o.html

scibyte94 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 16 May 13 - No Cached
  • Launched in 2009, the Kepler mission completed its 3.5-year planned run last year
  • monitors some 150,000 sunlike stars in search of transiting planets
Mars Base

3 Potentially Habitable Super-Earth Planets Explained (Infographic) | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/abitable-zone-infographic.html

scibyte91 scibyte92 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Kepler-62 is a red dwarf, only 20 percent as bright as the sun
  • located 1,200 light-years away from Earth
  • The Kepler-69 system contains one known planet in that star's habitable zone
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • a sun-like star located 2,700 light-years away,
  • As of April 2013, Kepler data has uncovered more than 2,700 potential planets, with about 120 of them having been confirmed to date
  • mission scientists expect that more than 90 percent of the planets detected are real and not illusions in the data
Mars Base

Habitable Worlds? New Kepler Planetary Systems in Images - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...er-planetary-systems-in-images

scibyte91 scibyte92 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • According to the Planetary Habitability Laboratory, there are now nine potential habitable worlds outside of our solar system, with 18 more potentally habitable planetary candidates found by Kepler waiting to be confirmed
  • astronomers predict there are 25 potentially habitable exomoons
  • Current known potentially habitable exoplanets. Credit: Planetary Habitability Laboratory/University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo
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