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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."
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.
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."
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.
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