* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Kepler mission

Blobrana · L

Kepler, a NASA Strategic mission, launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit on March 6, 2009, is designed to stare at a 105 square degree region of the sky in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. The mission's goal is to obtain long-term, unfiltered, and precise light curves of up to 100,000 cool stars and search for periodic transits of planets as small as the Earth. A secondary objective of the mission is to study rapid oscillations of the target stars in order to determine their ages, radii, and metallic chemical compositions. A general overview of the mission can be found at the Kepler mission web site. The in depth science pages lay out the scientific objectives in greater detail.
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Kepler telescope could find habitable moons
NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope, which astronomers hope will find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, might also find habitable moons in other solar systems, new research suggests.

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Blobrana · L

Stars put up for adoption to fund exoplanet research
Hard-up astronomers are raising funds for research by selling the only wares they have: the stars.
A nonprofit organisation has started an adopt-a-star programme to raise money for an international research consortium to analyse data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission.

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Star adoption helps fund Kepler mission
Though it's impossible to own a star, now you can adopt one. A new program offers people a chance to "adopt" one of the stars in a catalogue of targets where scientists hope to find Earth-like extrasolar planets.

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Nasa telescope passes planet test
Nasa space observatory launched in March this year has observed a planet circling another star.
In a test of its capability, the orbiting Kepler telescope detected the planet's atmosphere.
Kepler will survey our region of the Milky Way for Earth-sized planets which might be capable of supporting life.

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Blobrana · L

The first results are in from the Kepler orbiting observatory, the world's most powerful planet-searching telescope, and according to MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager they show that the instrument should have no trouble detecting "alien Earths" -- planets that are about the size of our own.
After its launch on March 6, Kepler began taking test data for engineering purposes. It was this engineering data, before the official inauguration of science operations, that produced the observatory's first published results, appearing this week in the journal Science. Seager, the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Science and Associate Professor of Physics, is part of the Kepler science team but was not personally involved in this initial paper. She appeared at a NASA press conference on Thursday, Aug. 6, to comment on the significance of the results.

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NASA'S Kepler Mission Spies Changing Phases in a Distant World
NASA's new exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope has detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating the telescope's extraordinary scientific capabilities. The discovery will be published Friday in the journal Science.
The find is based on a relatively short 10 days of test data collected before the official start of science operations. Kepler was launched March 6, 2009, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The observation demonstrates the extremely high precision of the measurements made by the telescope, even before its calibration and data analysis software were finished.

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Blobrana · L

William Borucki was more than a little bit nervous as he watched the Kepler spacecraft lift off from Cape Canaveral last March, and no wonder. It was way back in 1984 that he had first proposed sending up a telescope to search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars - and after more than two decades of tireless effort, it was finally happening.
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Blobrana · L

Kepler, the satellite launched by NASA in March to hunt for planets around other stars, found a planet in its first 10 days of operation, astronomers said. Astronomers already knew about the planet from other kinds of observations that swing around a yellow star in Cygnus known as HAT-P-7.

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