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NASA's New Telescope Finds Exoplanet Atmosphere
celticryan writes "NASA's new telescope has made a promising discovery. 'As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene,' said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!'"
There've been numerous measurements of this planet before. It was chosen because it's relatively well-studied for an exoplanet, so it was good to test the precision and accuracy of the sensors.
Just because you don't like the truth, does not make it false.
Read here about the Reboot issue:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17565-kepler-spacecraft-sees-its-first-exoplanets.html
Quoting:
The prime suspects are energetic charged particles known as cosmic rays. Earth's atmosphere shields us from these particles' potentially dangerous effects, but they bombard spacecraft at a rate of thousands per second.
If a cosmic ray hits a vulnerable spot in Kepler's electronics, it could cause a voltage spike that mimics a request from ground controllers to reboot the spacecraft's computer. "It could be that the computer is just chugging along doing everything fine, and then a cosmic ray comes sailing through," Fanson says. "All of a sudden it thinks it's been asked to reset, so it resets."
Alternatively, cosmic rays could toggle chips in the computer's memory, making it misinterpret instructions. The reboots could also be caused by a bug in the software, or half a dozen other things, Fanson says. "There are many, many things you have to look at that could be causing it. These systems are very complex," he says.