Message #243302

[Kristin Moore]

Hole in the Sun

Image courtesy TRACE/NASA

An ultraviolet view from TRACE shows Venus as a dark dot on the sun during the 2004 transit.

For the 2012 transit of Venus, scientists will use the Hubble Space Telescope to help improve techniques for finding and characterizing planets around other stars, aka exoplanets.

The hope is that Hubble's activity will be a good parallel to observations currently being carried out by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which looks for dips in starlight caused by planets transiting their host stars, as seen from Earth.

(Related: "NASA Finds Smallest Earthlike Planet Outside Solar System.")

Published June 4, 2012