Countdown To NASA's Kepler Mission

Adam Korbitz writes "NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission is set to launch late on the evening of March 6th. A few days ago, the space telescope arrived in Florida for final launch preparations. According to the NASA/JPL Planet Quest website: 'Kepler will hunt for planets using a specialized one-meter diameter telescope called a photometer to measure the small changes in brightness caused by the transits. Over a four-year period, Kepler will continuously view an amount of sky about equal to the size of a human hand held at arm's length or about equal in area to two "scoops" of the sky made with the Big Dipper constellation.' A map of the area Kepler will search is shown superimposed on a picture of the constellation Cygnus, The Swan. NASA has posted a countdown clock for Kepler, as well as animations of the spacecraft mission and the science objectives."

Comments

makes you realize just how good Hubble is

[pines225]

The statistic about "an amount of sky about equal to the size of a human hand held at arm's length" didn't stir me one way or t'other. But the article then says that Hubble can view the amount of sky equal to a grain of sand held at arms length. Makes you realise just how good the resolution Hubble's resolution is - all those amazing pictures of galaxies and nebulae are details that would be covered by such a tiny angular field.

Re:makes you realize just how good Hubble is

[Anonymous Coward]

If galaxies and nebulae were the angular size of a human hand held at arm's length, then we would just fucking see them every night with our naked eyes, so of course they must be smaller.

Re:makes you realize just how good Hubble is

[root_42]

If galaxies and nebulae were the angular size of a human hand held at arm's length, then we would just fucking see them every night with our naked eyes, so of course they must be smaller.

Absolutely not true. While many distant galaxies and several planetary nebulae seem to be pretty small from down here, most of the nearer galaxies and a lot of nebulae subtend quite a big angular size. The problem is that their radiosity is not bright enough for us to see them with the naked eye. But for example the andromeda galaxy is nearly the size of three full moons. However, with the naked eye under a dark sky, you can only see it's core as a smoky patch on the sky. Hundreds of other galaxies and nebulae are visible even in small telescopes. Especially non-planetary nebulae and some of the nearer galaxies are in fact so big that you tend to watch them at 20-50x magnification through an amateur telescope. As a comparision: Most planetary nebulae, as most planets, only reveal their details at 100-200x magnification.

Re:makes you realize just how good Hubble is

[mad_robot]

Did you know the Andromeda Galaxy covers something like 7 times the apparent width of the moon?

CCD Arrangment

[Neuropol]

How cool. They matched the CCD arrangment in order to macth the most effective pattern of target stars for corevage and efficientcy:

from the article: "The squares show the FOV of each of the 21 CCD modules. Each is 5 sq deg. Note that the gaps between the CCD modules are aligned so that about half of the 15 stars in the FOV brighter than mv=6 fall in these gaps."

Kepler uses NinnleBSD!

[Anonymous Coward]

The boffins at NASA have implemented a version of NinnleBSD to power this mission. There will be success.

Likelihood of transits?

[interactive_civilian]

Just out of curiosity, aren't there better things to look for than planets transiting the stars they orbit? I mean, obviously, since we have already observed it (right?), then it does happen, but how common can that be? I mean, what are the chances that the plane of the elliptic of a given star system will be edge on towards us? Just curious...

Re:Likelihood of transits?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

180 degrees to choose from, say it has to be within .18 degrees from planer with the earth, and you get a 0.1% chance of a random star having the orbital plane of planets coplanar with us.

Now multiply by the number of stars in the field of view (\infty), and you get an infinite number of stars will potentially show this effect.

Re:Likelihood of transits?

[thasmudyan]

The usual method for finding planets is looking for the "wobble" they cause as they displace their parent star through gravitational interaction while orbiting them. However, this is only suitable for really big planets.

Now, the observation of the transition moment offers a chance to see earth-sized planets, and quite possibly some additional data about their atmospheric composition can be gathered through spectroscopy.

This mission will give us some important data on the properties of the smaller extrasolar planets. The only problem is that by far not every system that has planets will have them cross directly in front of the star from our perspective. So we can't use that to have a thorough look at the really interesting systems close to our own, for example.

Re:Likelihood of transits?

[cetialphav]

I mean, what are the chances that the plane of the elliptic of a given star system will be edge on towards us?

From the article,

Kepler must monitor many thousands of stars simultaneously, since the chance of any one planet being aligned along the line-of-sight is only about 1/2 of a percent.

Since it can monitor thousands at a time, it is very likely that there are several likely suspects in its field of view at any one time.

Re:Likelihood of transits?

[Shag]

I mean, obviously, since we have already observed it (right?)

Yep; in fact there was a thread last month about a guy where I work doing this - but with a terrestrial telescope.

MOST

[XNormal]

This concept was pioneered in the canadian MOST(Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) mission. MOST is a suitcase-sized satellite build on a modest budget but still achieved some significant scientific results. Kepler follows in its footsteps with a larger and more powerful implementation.

The software architect for MOST is Henry Spencer

Two Scoops of Raisins

[Tablizer]

...amount of sky ... about equal in area to two "scoops" of the sky made with the Big Dipper constellation.'

I don't remember that metric in my Astronomy textbook. Didn't Kellogg's Raisin Bran invent that metric?
     

Re:Two Scoops of Raisins

[Eudial]

Ah, a sky-scoop is 10^16 square beard seconds

Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipper?

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

Okay, but what is that in real units of measurement, like Libraries of Congress?

Re:MOST - live with Dr. Matthews

[spaceyhackerlady]

I attended a talk by Jaymie Matthews last night on MOST and some of the very cool things they've found out with it.

He argued that historians 400 years from now will look back on our time as a time of great scientific progress, just as we look back on Galileo's time 400 years ago. In 30 years we have gone from a general relativity universe made of matter and energy to an accelerating universe made of mostly dark matter and dark energy. While we have our suspicions on dark matter, we don't have a clue (yet) on dark energy.

We are studying the universe in unprecedented detail and learning new things about it, but we are finding new mysteries too. Almost makes me want to go back to school and be a part of it.

...laura

Re:Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipp

[Fluffeh]

Oh goodness me!

This is three knotty ropes, which is the same as a quarter mule's kicked bucket, which is the same as a spilled beer's smell range, which is of course a tenth of the range of ten small children's screams which in turn are around half a busy intersection in the morning - which everyone knows is around a quarter of a Library of Congress.

Really, did it need to be drawn out in that much detail?

Alien Kepler conversation

[Anonymous Coward]

Alien 1: What is that thing?

Alien 2: I think it's some type of Earth-created orbital observatory meant to search for planets in other solar systems in an area of the Earth's sky about the size at arm's length of a human hand.

Alien 1: Ssshh... wait a minute. You hear that? I think there's noise coming from it. What's it saying?

Alien 2: Ummm, hold on a minute, let me adjust this. I think I can hear it now...

          Hmmm. I think it's saying, "Talk to the Hand."

Alien 1: Huh?

Alien 2: Dunno...

Re:Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipp

[4D6963]

That's 0.82 Libraries of Congress seen from the top of the Capitol. Or 0.0073 Libraries of Congress held at arm's length if you prefer.

Re:Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipp

[YourExperiment]

FYI, the site in your sig is currently flagged by Firefox as a "reported attack site".

Re:Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipp

[4D6963]

Damnit, it keeps getting hacked, no idea what's wrong with nearlyfreespeech.net's hosting...

Re:Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipp

[4D6963]

Probably my fault for using plain old FTP to upload.. I'm a noob with web stuff, hopefully changing the password and sticking to SFTP now will do the trick. Thanks for warning me btw :)

Re:Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipp

[YourExperiment]

No problem. I just thought the software sounded interesting and went for a look. When I got the warning, I thought I'd been duped, till I googled it and found it was for real.

Good luck sorting the site!

Re:Hand held at arm's length or two scoops of dipp

[4D6963]

Thanks, it's all sorted out, and Google recrawled it correctly :).