Countdown To NASA's Kepler Mission 27
Adam Korbitz writes "NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission is set to launch late on the evening of March 6th. A few days ago, the space telescope arrived in Florida for final launch preparations. According to the NASA/JPL Planet Quest website: 'Kepler will hunt for planets using a specialized one-meter diameter telescope called a photometer to measure the small changes in brightness caused by the transits. Over a four-year period, Kepler will continuously view an amount of sky about equal to the size of a human hand held at arm's length or about equal in area to two "scoops" of the sky made with the Big Dipper constellation.' A map of the area Kepler will search is shown superimposed on a picture of the constellation Cygnus, The Swan. NASA has posted a countdown clock for Kepler, as well as animations of the spacecraft mission and the science objectives."
Re:Likelihood of transits? (Score:5, Informative)
The usual method for finding planets is looking for the "wobble" they cause as they displace their parent star through gravitational interaction while orbiting them. However, this is only suitable for really big planets.
Now, the observation of the transition moment offers a chance to see earth-sized planets, and quite possibly some additional data about their atmospheric composition can be gathered through spectroscopy.
This mission will give us some important data on the properties of the smaller extrasolar planets. The only problem is that by far not every system that has planets will have them cross directly in front of the star from our perspective. So we can't use that to have a thorough look at the really interesting systems close to our own, for example.
Re:makes you realize just how good Hubble is (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely not true. While many distant galaxies and several planetary nebulae seem to be pretty small from down here, most of the nearer galaxies and a lot of nebulae subtend quite a big angular size. The problem is that their radiosity is not bright enough for us to see them with the naked eye. But for example the andromeda galaxy is nearly the size of three full moons. However, with the naked eye under a dark sky, you can only see it's core as a smoky patch on the sky. Hundreds of other galaxies and nebulae are visible even in small telescopes. Especially non-planetary nebulae and some of the nearer galaxies are in fact so big that you tend to watch them at 20-50x magnification through an amateur telescope. As a comparision: Most planetary nebulae, as most planets, only reveal their details at 100-200x magnification.
Re:makes you realize just how good Hubble is (Score:2, Informative)
Did you know the Andromeda Galaxy covers something like 7 times the apparent width of the moon [wikipedia.org]?
MOST (Score:4, Informative)
This concept was pioneered in the canadian MOST [wikipedia.org](Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) mission. MOST is a suitcase-sized satellite build on a modest budget but still achieved some significant scientific results [astro.ubc.ca]. Kepler follows in its footsteps with a larger and more powerful implementation.
The software architect for MOST is Henry Spencer [wikipedia.org]