US launches telescope to look for Earth-like planets

[Bianca]

A computer-generated image of the Kepler spacecraft. The United States has launched a space telescope whose three-year mission is to find Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

(AFP/
NASA/File)

[Bianca]

                                     US launches telescope to look for Earth-like planets






March 7, 2009
WASHINGTON
(AFP)

– The United States has launched a space telescope whose three-year mission is to find Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

The Kepler telescope blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, atop a Delta II rocket 10:49 pm (0349 GMT Saturday), according to the US space agency NASA.

It separated from its carrier 62 minutes after launch at the altitude of more than 721 kilometers (448 miles).

"This mission attempts to answer a question that is as old as time itself -- are other planets like ours out there?" said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

"It's not just a science mission, it's an historical mission."

Kepler will stare at the same spot in space for three and a half years, taking in about 100,000 stars around the Cygnus and Lyra constellations of the Milky Way.

At a cost of nearly 600 million dollars, it will be the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, at just the right distance and temperature for life-sustaining water to exist.

The telescope will be hunting for relatively small planets that are neither too hot nor too cold, are rocky and have liquid water -- essential life-sustaining conditions -- explained William Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator based at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

"If we find that many, it certainly will mean that life may well be common throughout our galaxy, that there is an opportunity for life to have a place to evolve," Borucki said.

"If none or only a few of these planets are found, it might suggest that habitable planets like Earth are very rare and Earth may be a lonely outpost for life."

Equipped with the largest camera ever launched into space -- a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices (CCDs) -- the Kepler telescope is able to detect the faint, periodic dimming of stars that planets cause as they pass by.

"If Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front," according to Kepler project manager James Fanson.

"Trying to detect Jupiter-size planets crossing in front of their stars is like trying to measure the effect of a mosquito flying by a car's headlight.

"Finding Earth-sized planets is like trying to detect a very tiny flea in that same headlight."

Kepler's discoveries "may fundamentally alter humanity's view of itself," Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at the NASA's Washington headquarters, said last month.

"The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."

Ever since astronomers first turned their telescopes to the sky, humans have been searching for other planets. But the small size of planets compared to stars has complicated the task. Only eight planets have been found in our solar system -- Pluto is now considered a mere planetoid.

Since 1995, some 337 planets have been found orbiting around stars outside our solar system, but they are all bigger than Earth and do not have Earth-like conditions that make life possible.

The French-led COROT satellite, which has been in orbit since 2006, has already discovered the smallest extraterrestrial planet so far. At a little over twice the Earth's diameter, the planet is very close to its star and very hot, astronomers reported earlier this month.

Astronomer Debra Fischer at San Francisco State University said that NASA's mission is a cornerstone in understanding what types of planets are formed around other stars.

Information that Kepler will help compile, she said, "will help us chart a course toward one day imaging a pale blue dot like our planet, orbiting another star in our galaxy."

[Bianca]

                                 Kepler Spacecraft Blasts Off to Hunt Earth-Like Worlds
         





Tariq Malik
senior Editor
space.com
– Sat Mar 7, 2009


NASA's new planet-hunting Kepler telescope launched into space late Friday, lighting up the night sky above Florida as it began an ambitious mission to seek out Earth-like planets around alien stars.


Kepler blasted off atop a Delta 2 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 10:49 p.m. EST (0349 March 7 GMT). The $600 million spacecraft will gaze at a single region of our Milky Way galaxy for at least three years in a planetary census that, scientists say, could fundamentally alter humanity's view of its role in the universe.


"At the end of those three years, we'll be able to answer, 'Are there other worlds out there or are we alone?'" said William Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., before launch.


Kepler separated from its booster about an hour after liftoff and headed toward an Earth-trailing orbit that will circle the sun once every 371 days. The successful liftoff came on the heels of NASA's Feb. 24 failure of a landmark climate-monitoring satellite, which crashed into the ocean just after launch.

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A planet like ours "out there"



Named after the 17th century German scientist Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, NASA's Kepler spacecraft will use those laws to seek out Earth-like worlds around distant stars.


The spacecraft will point its unblinking eye at a patch of sky near the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, where it will scan some 100,000 stars for the telltale dip in brightness that signals a planet crossing in front of its parent star as seen from Earth. The tiny "wink" in light that Kepler is designed to measure with its 95 million-pixel camera is comparable to a person trying to watch a flea cross a car's headlight from miles away, NASA officials have said.


Astronomer Geoff Marcy, a Kepler co-investigator at the University of California at Berkeley, called Kepler a "mission for the ages."


"Kepler is the first telescope ever conceived by humanity that can actually detect planets like Earth," Marcy said just before launch.


Since 1995, astronomers have discovered nearly 340 planets beyond our own Solar System, but the search has turned up mainly inhospitable worlds the size of Jupiter or larger that circle parent stars in orbits too extreme to sustain life as we know it.


NASA hopes to use Kepler to sift through those planetary behemoths for the smaller, rocky worlds - like our own Earth - that happen to orbit their parent stars in a region just right for liquid water to exist at the surface.


"What exists is an incredibly random, chaotic, you know, wild range of planets," said Debra Fischer, an astronomer at the San Francisco State University who is not directly involved with the Kepler mission, in a recent briefing. "Kepler is really going to probe the habitable zones of planets."


The range of the so-called habitable zone, or Goldilocks zone, around a star varies depending on the star's size, but is generally considered to be the region in which liquid water - an essential ingredient of life on Earth - can exist at the surface.  Too close to a star and a planet is too hot, while too far out will yield icy, frozen worlds, researchers said.


"What we want is a temperature that's just right," said Borucki. "The so-called Goldilocks zone."

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More work ahead


With Kepler now in space, the work to outfit the telescope for its planet-hunting mission will begin in earnest.


Jim Fanson, NASA's Kepler project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said Thursday that flight controllers plan to spend the next two months performing a series of tests to make sure Kepler is healthy and ready to work. If all goes well, the protective dust cover shielding Kepler's telescope eye will open about three weeks after liftoff.

Mission scientists hope to begin spotting larger Jupiter-like planets first, and then narrow the hunt down to Earth-like worlds as the mission wears on. While Kepler is designed to last about 3 1/2 years, it carries enough fuel to run for six years, they said.

But first, NASA has to get the spacecraft into its planet-hunting position.

"We have a lot of calibrations to do," Fanson said.





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