NASA's Kepler Mission Extended For Two Years 58
An anonymous reader writes "A report just released from NASA's senior review panel recommends extending the Kepler mission(Pdf), initially for two years. 'Kepler is not only a unique source of exoplanet discoveries, but also an organizing and rallying point for exo-planet research. It has enabled remarkable stellar science." The scaled-down budget for the extended mission was broadly expected to include funding only for continued operations and management, with no funding for science. Astronomers have already started seeking private funding to continue their Kepler-related work, through crowd-funding websites like PetriDish and FundaGeek, as well as through the non-profit Pale Blue Dot project."
Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
This is awesome! The longer Kepler is up, the more chance it has of finding Earth-like planets. It isn't simply a matter of probability, but the need to see three transits to get confirmation. So at least two Earth years, but often more like 3-5 years. The longer it is up, the more longer orbital period planets it will find!
I love this!
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
This is awesome! The longer Kepler is up, the more chance it has of finding Earth-like planets. It isn't simply a matter of probability, but the need to see three transits to get confirmation. So at least two Earth years, but often more like 3-5 years. The longer it is up, the more longer orbital period planets it will find!
I love this!
I appreciate your optimism, but the NASA senior review panel has absolutely nothing to do with funding decisions, which are all in the hands of Congress. Unless crowd-sourcing works (which is effective for such things as Kickstarter comic book drives, but not science, last I checked), and is more effective than the white house official petition website (aka, not effective) NASA will be out of luck, sad to say.
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It's not fair to say they have "absolutely nothing to do with funding decisions." A negative review can quite certainly kill a mission. A good review is something like a necessary, but not sufficient, condition, to get the funding necessary.
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Twenty years ago, we knew of 9 planets. Now we can begin to do statistical analysis on families of solar systems. It's a huge affirmation of long-held suspicions that previously had no real data to support them. It's a huge boost to being able to model solar system formation. It's really useful information EVEN THOUGH you can't fly to those planets yourself and crunch around on the surface in your hiking boots. Ugh.
We can't dictate advances in propulsion technology on a schedule that's convenient for
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But it's too expens--OW (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like SETI, it always ticks me off when space and science projects are shelved because "it costs too much".
The cost to run SETI a year = one army fighter plane
50 years of NASA = the bank-bailout
I've shut people up who say "the space program costs too much!" with those two facts alone. It'd be nice if we did spend too much on astronomy and science. "Sorry Mr. President, we can't go to war with (insert country with oil or other resources we want control of). We decided to spend money on cool shit that's gonna expand our feeble minds for once."
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Uhm...there are no army fighter planes...fighter aircraft only exist in the airforce and naval services...
Does anybody really care?
Do you realise that what you pointed out adds absolutely nothing to the whole point he was making?
It is obvious you did it just to find something to moan about. TBH, its pretty sad when you're doing it over something so piteously irrelevant as a minor grammar error.
Re:But it's too expens--OW (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.
Grandparent has a decent point, but the fact that he whiffed on several key points detracts from his argument. No, the army doesn't have fighters. Also, No, the president can't declare war. You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect. Just as the president using the military as his personal pop-gun squad without the approval of the people (or more accurately, their elected representatives.) is incorrect. It's not that hard to double check something, especially here on ye olde intertubes. Doing so kinda fits with that whole "Do it right the first time" ethic that has died off in society these days.
If you want to make your point heard, don't run around screaming half-assed, half remembered sound bites. Make a simple, well thought out, perhaps even slightly researched point. It's harder to refute. You also find out interesting things like the fact that it costs a mere $2.5 million dollars per year to run the Allen Seti array (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/10/success-seti-array-back-on-track/), and that the government accounting office was estimating a cost of $412 million per unit for the F-22 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Production_and_procurement). So you could run the array for about 165 years on the cost of "one army fighter." 165 years vs. 1 year? Gosh, that argument just gained some interesting new perspective, and I did it without sounding like your drunk uncle who spent thanksgiving bleating out Rush Limbaugh's fascinating rhetoric and explaining how liberals are ruining the country.
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There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.
During SETI's time when it was shut down, that's as much as it'd cost. I didn't say F-22, that's getting extremely specific, and it goes by today's standards; if I say "my house is worth as much as a car" (which in some cases, it is; a POS trailer built in the 60s when electricians got their licenses from a 7-11, apparently), for you to assume that it's the cost of
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There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.
But "the air force doesn't have fighters" isn't even disagreeing with the person. So how can it possibly be on that side of the line?
You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect.
It's not incorrect in any way that matters in this context. What you said is only correct in a legal context. For the purpose of the point being made "war" is any large military conflict -- what most people would call war despite the legal definition, e.g. the Vietnam War.
Which is more important to the OP's point: Whether something was labelled a "war" by Congress, or whet
Re:But it's too expens--OW (Score:5, Insightful)
You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect. Just as the president using the military as his personal pop-gun squad without the approval of the people (or more accurately, their elected representatives.) is incorrect.
What a ridiculous thing to say. War is an English word with a commonly accepted meaning, i.e.:
war (wôr)
n.
1.
a. A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.
The Iraq War was a war. The Vietnam War was a war. The Afghanistan War is a war. They're all called wars in natural English language, and they all meet the criteria. Sending 100,000 troops into a sovereign nation with the express purpose of toppling their government and replacing it with one friendly to your cause is a war in as classic a sense as you can get.
Whether the White House has found some legal loop hole that allows them to avoid doing what the constitution says they have to do to go to war doesn't have any relevance. If the Attorney General found a way of classifying Afghanistan as a Charity Bake Sale it still wouldn't make it one; it would just mean that the legal code has more holes than Swiss cheese.
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+1 to everything you said, I wish I had mod points. Ask the Iraqis or the Vietnamese or the Afghans if they were in a war and I think you'd see unanimous agreement. Maybe not a war that threatens US territory or require any wartime means within US borders, but obviously a war. Even the President agrees with this, here's a few quotes from his Nobel Prize speech:
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. (...) Still, we are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.
Invading foreign countries in an act of war, and action speaks louder than words. It is a war whether Congress signs off on it or not, I think the G
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The old saying goes: it looks like armrd conflict, it walks like armed conflict, it quacks like armed conflict. It probably is a war.
But then we'd have to give War on Terror (1984), War on Drugs, War on Full-Frontal Nudity aso. a new set of names. Like domestic policy.
Americans use war like arabs use jihad. Populisticly.
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The United States Air Force started out as a part of the U.S. Amry Signal Corps, and later evolved into the Army Air Corp... being commanded by a Captain (army... equivalent to a Lieutenant in the Navy) when that was formed no less. Many other countries also followed a similar pattern.
There was talk right before the Gulf War for the U.S. Army to take over the duties of flying and maintaining the A-10 fighters and perhaps even reconstituting the Army Air Corps (when went over like a lead balloon with the US
kickstarter for a space probe? (Score:2)
man, i am with you 100%. but lets think about it, what do those two things have in common? war and bailouts? it is the government wasting our money because our corrupt politicians take 'campaign contributions' (bribes) from companies and hedge funders, and then they decide the government budget that will benefit those 'investors' that profit from war and from bailouts.
we are just going to have to start funding this stuff ourselves. imagine all the school kids who are still idealistic about this stuff. i kn
Re:kickstarter for a space probe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And everybody wonders why the government is inept and the country bankrupt.
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That is a very informative chart. Thank you for posting it.
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Kepler's produced great stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
But I think already we have the important data: thousands of planets! And these are just that tiny fraction that have orbits that take them across the line between their sun and ours. Thousands of times as many planets have orbits that would not cause a transit.
The point is we now have enough data to estimate the density of planets in the galaxy. So you could say the basic goals of Kepler have been accomplished and the rest is gravy.
Re: Kepler's produced great stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree with that, and that's what NASA's fixin' ta do.
Re:Kepler's produced great stuff (Score:5, Informative)
But I think already we have the important data: thousands of planets! And these are just that tiny fraction that have orbits that take them across the line between their sun and ours. Thousands of times as many planets have orbits that would not cause a transit.
The point is we now have enough data to estimate the density of planets in the galaxy. So you could say the basic goals of Kepler have been accomplished and the rest is gravy.
The Review panel agrees with you, and even goes further to politely tap the Kepler science team on the bottom and to try to point them in the right direction. Looking at the "Proposal Weaknesses" section (emphasis is my addition):
Since masses cannot be determined, Kepler can only directly measure an upper limit to [the frequency of Earth-like planets]. The proposal over-emphasizes the capability of Kepler to directly determine [the frequency of Earth-like planets] as compared to the contribution of Kepler determination of exoplanet statistics. The strong focus of the proposal on the detection of a few (e.g. 0 – 20) “Earth-like” bodies leaves the plan subject to criticism for the very high dollar cost of a few new objects, few or none of which can be followed up for mass characterization through Doppler shift measurements.
So basically they are telling the Kepler science team (rightly so) to pipe down about the Earth-like planets we can't do any more science with at this time and instead talk about the amazing stuff they can do with the statistics they've gathered. This is not even talking about what else can be done with these data; Kepler is an outstanding stellar astrophysics mission.
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If you had a system with multiple planets, you might get some rough estimates on masses if you knew the distance from the star and orbital periods. But the reason we can pin down solar system planet's masses so well is because we can observe their location at nearly all points in their orbit to great precision, and can see stuff like the precession of orbits. Just having transit times isn't going to give you anywhere near that kind of information to work with.
I would give astrophysicists a whole lot more credit for really understanding Newton's laws of motion or even General Relativity so far as how it applies to the motion of stars and planets. The information you can obtain from the stellar data coming from Kepler is a bit more involved than just transit times, and you can tell quite a bit in terms of the masses of other planets if you notice that some planet is "early" or "late" achieving a transit across the parent star. There is a suggestion that "moons (
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Actually, no. The goal of Kepler was to find Earth-like planets in the habitable zone and we don't have any confirmed planets of that type yet. Turns out that the stars in general are a lot noisier than our own so we need a few more years to beat down the noise.
This was good news for Kepler!
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Not quite.
Kepler was designed to detect earth-like planets.
It does this by detecting the dimming of the star when a planet passes in front of it.
Unfortunately, the sun has turned out to not be very typical.
Most stars are much more flickery than the sun - which we diddn't realise until Kepler.
This means that it's quite hard to pick up an earth-like planet in an earth-like orbit crossing the star.
Both larger planets - they obscure more of the star, so are more visible, and closer in - they orbit much more rap
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Mine too!
I strongly recommend watching the Kepler conference.
http://keplergo.arc.nasa.gov/ScienceKepSciCon1.shtml [nasa.gov]
This is awesome!
You need some science background - if you don't know what a harmonic is, or a power spectra - you'll be pretty lost.
But as it's a new field, I was able to keep up with about 80% of the content, even though I only have a couple of semesters of physics under my belt, and a very limited understanding of the maths.
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So you could say the basic goals of Kepler have been accomplished and the rest is gravy.
It may be gravy, but it is very delicious gravy that is very difficult to get any other way. The ongoing science that Kepler is doing right now is amazing, and some of the stars they are monitoring right now need to have observations that last several years for some of the most revealing data to come forth. Some of that involves how Kepler is acquiring that data in the first place.
What is happening here is that this device is looking for transits of planets across the disc of the star being observed. For
*might* be extended. (Score:2)
"senior review panel recommends" does not mean "Congress has approved".
Until there's a budget passed, senior reviews mean nothing. And if Congress puts in enough mandates on NASA's plate without increasing the budget, something's gotta get cut.
If the budget's cut, are they going to give up on the JWST, or Kepler and dozens of other smaller projects that are returning results now? Are they going to grab money from earth science, heliophysics, the manned space program, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm just c
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"senior review panel recommends" does not mean "Congress has approved".
Until there's a budget passed, senior reviews mean nothing. And if Congress puts in enough mandates on NASA's plate without increasing the budget, something's gotta get cut.
If the budget's cut, are they going to give up on the JWST, or Kepler and dozens of other smaller projects that are returning results now? Are they going to grab money from earth science, heliophysics, the manned space program, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I don't think it's a good time to be in astronomy at NASA.
It's not a good time to be in astronomy in general. I know, I left the field because of the few jobs available...
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Until there's a budget passed, senior reviews mean nothing. And if Congress puts in enough mandates on NASA's plate without increasing the budget, something's gotta get cut.
If the budget's cut, are they going to give up on the JWST, or Kepler and dozens of other smaller projects that are returning results now?
There are just two significant programs NASA is working on: The SLS and JWST. Almost the entire rest of NASA is being cut to support both programs.... that in my own opinion neither one of these projects are ever going to actually work much less worry about getting much else accomplished.
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Given the experience of the last few years, I won't be holding my breath - Congress hasn't passed an actual budget, worthy of the name, on time, since 2009.
it just needs to work a little bit longer (Score:1)
... and then we'll bring it home for doing a good job. we promise. [xkcd.com]
so much more work to be done (Score:2)
:Adopt a Star... (Score:2)
Ugh. I simply cannot stand star "adoption."
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Now, to be clear - it's "Name a Star" crap that they sell on the radio near Valentine's Day that I hate. And they'll even put it into an "International Registry!"