NASA's New Telescope Finds Exoplanet Atmosphere 124
celticryan writes "NASA's new telescope has made a promising discovery. 'As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene,' said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!'"
Re:lame (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Deju Vu? (Score:4, Informative)
Impressive light curve! Kepler reboots? (Score:5, Informative)
If you get a chance to look at TFA, you'll see a comparison between the light curve as captured by ground based observatories and by Kepler. Makes a pretty compelling statement for doing observations in space, no noise! (Actually there is noise but you have to really zoom into the data like they do on the Kepler web site).
Anyway, I've been following the Kepler program on their web site and have read of a couple of "reboots" where they had to put the spacecraft into safe mode. Anyone know if they've found/fixed the problem? It's not good to have a program specifically designed for 3+ years of non-stop continuous observation to have intermittent gaps in its observations!
It's amazing to think that within a few years we should know if there are plentiful earth sized planets in the "habitable zones" around stars! Extrapolating from today's news release, maybe we'll even know if they have atmospheres! (Does anyone know how much more difficult it would be to "see" an atmosphere around an earth sized planet as opposed to a "hot jupiter"?).
Re:Reminds me... (Score:2, Informative)
Well It is a good thing that planet hunters are better at finding things than you, seeing as they have found 358 extrasolar planets. From what I hear, it is much harder to observe the wobble of a star's red shift or see the wink of a star as a planet travels between us and it, than it is to break open a rock in a known trilobite bed.
Source http://exoplanet.eu/catalog.php [exoplanet.eu]
Re:Reminds me... (Score:4, Informative)
That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard. It's a completely invalid comparison. The planet was already known to have a transiting exoplanet so it's not like it was dumb luck. As someone pointed out this verifies that everything on the spacecraft is working properly. To date, lots of transiting exoplanets have been found and it's not luck, it's statistics that tell us there will be more.
Re:[NO CARRIER] (Score:3, Informative)
no text.
usually means the entirety of the post is in the subject line, or sometimes used lazily as a 'me too!' post in reply to a request etc.
Re:Impressive light curve! Kepler reboots? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17565-kepler-spacecraft-sees-its-first-exoplanets.html
Quoting:
The prime suspects are energetic charged particles known as cosmic rays. Earth's atmosphere shields us from these particles' potentially dangerous effects, but they bombard spacecraft at a rate of thousands per second.
If a cosmic ray hits a vulnerable spot in Kepler's electronics, it could cause a voltage spike that mimics a request from ground controllers to reboot the spacecraft's computer. "It could be that the computer is just chugging along doing everything fine, and then a cosmic ray comes sailing through," Fanson says. "All of a sudden it thinks it's been asked to reset, so it resets."
Alternatively, cosmic rays could toggle chips in the computer's memory, making it misinterpret instructions. The reboots could also be caused by a bug in the software, or half a dozen other things, Fanson says. "There are many, many things you have to look at that could be causing it. These systems are very complex," he says.
Re:Impressive light curve! Kepler reboots? (Score:1, Informative)
The mission has a number of safe mode days per year budgeted. It's hard to keep everything running when cosmic rays are raining down on your computer.
Re:Hot Jupiter, yawn (Score:4, Informative)
That would be the New Worlds telescope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission [wikipedia.org]
The beauty of a plotted curve (Score:2, Informative)
And I simply say that gravity is as much a signature of something's existence as a direct photograph of it, we have many ways we can measure something is there. Just as you do if you live in a cabin in the woods, you come to learn what a bear footprint looks like very quickly, and if you see such a footprint outside one morning, you'll start looking for the bear that was once there. You're not going to say, "oh, I didn't see the bear, therefore it couldn't have existed."
That's how astronomy works. You're looking for bear prints in the vast space of the universe.
Re:Hot Jupiter, yawn (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Impressive light curve! Kepler reboots? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, Kepler is in an unusual orbit. [nasa.gov] It's not orbiting Earth, it's orbiting the Sun, although it's designed to stay close to the Earth over its mission lifetime. But it is only receiving partial protection by the Earth's magnetosphere. It's possible that it will be more vulnerable to single event upsets (SEUs) [wikipedia.org] as time goes on.