The Kepler Mission-Fail or Survive
NASA’s first mission that was designed to find Earth-size and smaller planets was the development of the Kepler mission, now scheduled to launch in 2008 instead of 2006 due to company and financial issues. It will monitor the brightness of stars to find planets, when in the planets’ orbits, will pass in front of them. During these front passes, the planets will decrease the start’s brightness, with this brief dimming measurement helping NASA scientist detect the Earth-size and larger planets near the HZ, or habitable zones—a zone that has hope of existence of liquid water on the surface of that particular planet.
With the Kepler mission will consist of a special purpose spacecraft that measures light variations precisely from distant stars, looking for planetary transits. A transit consists of the blocking of light from a parent star where a planet passes in front of it. According to NASA, the measuring of repeated transits with regular periods, durations, and changes in brightness, will provide a rigourous method for the discovery and confirmation of planets and their orbits.
The Kessler spacecraft will survey four classes of star once it is launched—the F stars which are bigger and brighter than our sun, the G stars which are similar to our sun in size and brightness, and both K and M stars which are smaller and less bright than our sun. The area operated will be 500 times the area of the Earth’s moon, while also operating the brightness of 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
In order for Kepler to consider the planetary transits a valid planetary candidate, it must measure three transits of the planet. Ground based telescopes must also observe each chosen star to eliminate the nearby stars that imitate the planetary transit’s signal. This requires a minimum of several months before the announcement can be made of the planet’s find. What this means, is that the most futuristic valuable discoveries of the Kesler mission will not occur until the end of the mission around 2012.
A combined effort for the NASA project, it is of the “The Kepler mission is a NASA Ames Research Center collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Los Cumbre Observatory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Lawrence Hall of Science, the SETI Institute, the McDonald Observatory, the University of California at Berkeley, York University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Carnegie Institute, Lowell Observatory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Harvard University, University of Hawaii, University of Washington, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation.”
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 5:58 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
