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NASA's Kepler Telescope Launched Successfully
Iddo Genuth writes "At precisely 10:49 p.m. EST, NASA's 'Kepler' telescope was successfully kicked off into space, embarking on a mission that the agency says 'may fundamentally change humanity's view of itself.' The telescope will search the nearby region of our galaxy for the first time looking for Earth-size planets, which orbit stars at distances where temperatures permit liquid water to endure on their surface — a region often referred to as the 'habitable' zone."
I've always wanted to travel to other worlds... Unfortunately it would take hundreds of years at near light speed...
Congrats to everyone involved! And what a way to start off Spring IYA 2009!
FreeBSD bounties
...but it's generating it's own power and is communicating. From http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/mar/HQ_09-052_Kepler_launches.html
This means:
1. THEY don't want the world to know the truth about global warming.
2. THEY know that Kepler will be pointed the wrong way anyway.
Nasa needs to get the facts:
You take the good, you take the bad,
you crash billions of dollars of equipment into the ocean,
The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.
There's a time you got to go and show
You're growin' now you know about
The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.
When the world never seems
to be livin up to your dreams
And suddenly you're finding out
the Facts of Life are all about you, you.
It takes a lot to get 'em right
When you're learning the Facts of Life. (learning the Facts of Life)
Learning the Facts of Life (learning the Facts of Life)
Learning the Facts of Life.
Ahh, I never get sick of that old Alan Thicke jingle.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I don't think such an ethnocentric view of space life is going to pan out so well.
Eat sleep die
"Kicked off into space"? I thought they usually used rockets for space launches. Is this some new, eco-friendly launch technology based on that big boot that Australians use to punish children?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I know this is obvious to most people but the "habitable zone" is awfully generous. It's hard to gauge the exact amount of heat given off by a star from as far away as we are. Plus, the atmosphere content is extremely important. Our moon is basically the same distance away from the sun as us and with no atmosphere it goes from like -180 to +200 F or something like that. So yeah, it kinda needs to have an exact amount of certain gases to keep water from boiling and freezing repeatedly, which would probably kill everything organic in it. And how are be supposed to tell if it's 40% as opposed to 50% CO2 in the atmosphere from all the way out here? It's impossible and that could mean a huuuuge temperature difference. So even if they find one that's supposedly perfect from what we can detect, it's still extremely likely that it's not.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
It's not like we can send a robot or probe there that will reach its destination anytime before we're all dead and gone and for all we know the fact that we even sent it will be forgotten.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The vast majority of people already have it in their minds that there are either aliens, or angels, or both. So, if they find a planet that might have life on it, its not going to be a shocker to anyone but the scientists who trumpet this discovery. For the rest of us, its no big deal at all.
This is my sig.
Awesome. I lead the machining operations (Project Keebler) for the honeycombing of the mirror core. So long ago, another time in my life.
Instead of a low Earth orbit like Hubble, Kepler is going to use an "Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit with a period of 372.5 days.": http://kepler.nasa.gov/sci/design/orbit.html
Since this is internet, and, believe it or not, there are some people outside US, why the editors of the articles don't convert the times to UTC?
If you RTFA you'll see they are after statistics, not detailed data. They want to estimate the number of planets that have approximately the same characteristics as Earth.
The Kepler will keep monitoring the same 100000 stars during five years. The number of planets detected around those stars will give a rough idea on how likely it is to find earth-like planets.
I for one welcome our benevolnt overloads...
If we can find (by telescope) somewhere worthwhile to go to (ie a habitable planet that we can colonize) then it will be a lot easier to get investment and support for developing ways (FTL drives, ships etc) to go there.
You aren't at all interested in knowing how common the Earth is? Whether the process that lead to the Earth orbiting the sun happens only rarely? What other planets are like? Do many (any?) of them have life, or something like it? If they do, what form does it take, is it like us? While Kepler won't answer all these questions, it's a small, but significant step in a long-term plan to address all of these questions. Even if we never are capable of ever going to any of these planets, I'd still like to know the answers to the above questions. And, as another poster mentioned, what better way to convince people to work on technology to travel to other stars than to find a specific destination to go to?
apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health?
Boo to CNN for showing some economic program rerun instead of breaking away for just a few minutes for the launch.
The Aztecs farmed their neihbors as a meat source. The Spaniards accidently killed huge numbers with disease. It only realy needs one man to do that. However, The Spaniards were mainly interested in gold, then Cocoa beans, then silver IIRC.
Our species is not a unique and special snowflake. We're likely to see all kinds of convergent evolution. An example from biology: Cephalopods. (Squids, octopuses, and so on.) We can use Cephalopods to test theories about extraterrestrial life like we can use Antarctica to test Mars rovers.
The most developed of these is the Octopus. Not only do these guys have eyes that are better than our own, but they have brains. This is important because our last common ancestor with these guys had neither brains nor eyes, and was as complex as yeast. Yet the Octopus nervous system has quite a few similarities to our own:
Any technological alien civilization would face the same mathematical evolutionary pressures described by game theory, and would develop along lines close to our own. The differences we see between alien cultures and our own will be on the order of the differences between human cultures, and not something radically different.
Why would you suppose that the distance between us and extraterrestrial life would be any greater than that between us and the octopus? We can be reasonably confident that:
Really, we're not going to see off-the-wall organisms. They'll have eyes. They'll have brains. Anything that required technology will require air, fire, and water. Fire requires oxygen, so our aliens will have roughly the same atmospheric needs we do.
The differences we may see are in the arbitrary choices evolution has made: I think we'll see extraterrestrial life use some of the amino acids that don't occur in nature here. Maybe their proteins and carbohydrates have opposite orientations. But the fundamental structures will be very similar because the problem is similar everywhere!
Also, cultu
Captain, sensor readings indicate three M-Class planets...
Most of planets discovered so far been through the doppler velocity method which is biased to large, fast, close-in planets, because thats what causes the larger and more easily detectable doppler shifts. Kepler use the "transit method" the temporary dimming of a star by a planet crossing in front of it. It should be able see smaller, slower, far out planets.
Modeling suggests about one in thousand stars will have planets and will be tilted in the right way to see planetary transits. Kepler will watch a couple hundred thousand stars for three years and perhaps discover a couple hundred planets.
Everything I have learned from TV is that this is the kind of event listed in a prologue of a movie about an alien invasion.