Deep Impact Probe to Look for Earth-sized Planets

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "NASA has given University of Maryland scientists the green light to fly the Deep Impact probe to Comet Hartley 2. The spacecraft will pass Earth on New Year's Eve at the beginning of a more than two-and-a-half-year journey to Hartley 2. During the first six months of the journey to Hartley 2, they will use the larger of the two telescopes on Deep Impact to search for Earth-sized planets around five stars selected as likely candidates for such planets. Upon arriving at the comet, Deep Impact will conduct an extended flyby of Hartley 2 using all three of the spacecraft's instruments — two telescopes with digital color cameras and an infrared spectrometer."

Re:Exciting News

[Anonymous Coward]

the moron above me linked to his lame minicity- mod him into the ground

Re:I Am Not An Astronomer

[wizardforce]

yes, crude temperature variation maps of extrasolar planetary atmospheres and in one case finding the spectral lines indicating water vapor in the atmosphere of another planet. We already know the mass, orbit time and eccentricity of certain extrasolar planets as it is as well.

Re:Two is better than one

[Xzzy]

After the budget the Senate passed on Monday, doing much of anything is pretty unlikely.

NASA were just about the only guys to get a budget increase (3%), and even what they got will require sacrificing programs.

Landscape is even worse for other fields of science:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1218/1 [sciencemag.org]

Re:how big

[edunbar93]

It doesn't need to be very big. Even ground-based amateur astronomers are able to detect transiting exoplanets using consumer-grade imaging equipment. You basically need a CMOS camera that's sensitive enough, and know when and where to look. If you record the star's brightness over the expected period of time, you can see the difference in your own measurements.

The drawback of using Hubble to do this is that astronomers the world over are competing for time on it, so it's booked solid. The University of British Columbia has a satellite of its own [astro.ubc.ca], with a 150mm telescope (much smaller than Hubble's 2m) in orbit specifically to look for transiting extrasolar planets. They basically observe one star for months at a time, hoping to catch the dip in the star's brightness that would mean a planet is transiting. The telescope on this probe is probably about the same size, and since it's not going to be doing anything for the next year or so, why not point it at some candidate stars for that period? You might just get lucky. The fact that there's no atmospheric interference is really what makes the difference between discovering a jupiter-sized planet and an earth-sized planet with this method.

Details on the instruments

[Midnight Warrior]

For those of you who miss it on the main web-site, Ball Aerospace [ballaerospace.com] developed most of the scientific instruments. They are becoming pivotal to many of today's space-based observation instruments. Details on their involvement with Deep Impact are here. [ballaerospace.com]