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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.
no, wrong telescope, wrong story, wrong mission.
I am not in any way affiliated with this or any other planet finding project, so I am "the public," and I certainly will care. I hope this happens in my lifetime. Imaging the surface of an exoplanet may be more of a challenge than finding an interesting one, given the distance. But I suppose you think no one anywhere cares about anything, the future will be worse than the past, and our society is heading downhill at even ever-increasing speed. People have thought that for thousands of years and we still get by, so I'm not worried. Bring on tomorrow.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
One day I expect Kepler to discover an Earth-like planet with an Earth-like atmosphere and the public won't even care. Getting funding to image the surface of that planet will be an uphill battle and even if the returned images show undoubted proof of intelligent life, people still won't care.
Sadly, I think you're right.
NASA will have to pay money to Big Media for a spot on a reality show. Two morbidly obese women will be mud wrestling... the camera pulls back and Paris Hilton is now in the foreground saying "Life on other planets is hot! Drink Red Bull!"
.
Trolling is a art,
If you get a chance to look at TFA, you'll see a comparison between the light curve as captured by ground based observatories and by Kepler. Makes a pretty compelling statement for doing observations in space, no noise! (Actually there is noise but you have to really zoom into the data like they do on the Kepler web site).
Anyway, I've been following the Kepler program on their web site and have read of a couple of "reboots" where they had to put the spacecraft into safe mode. Anyone know if they've found/fixed the problem? It's not good to have a program specifically designed for 3+ years of non-stop continuous observation to have intermittent gaps in its observations!
It's amazing to think that within a few years we should know if there are plentiful earth sized planets in the "habitable zones" around stars! Extrapolating from today's news release, maybe we'll even know if they have atmospheres! (Does anyone know how much more difficult it would be to "see" an atmosphere around an earth sized planet as opposed to a "hot jupiter"?).
Anyway, I've been following the Kepler program on their web site and have read of a couple of "reboots" where they had to put the spacecraft into safe mode. Anyone know if they've found/fixed the problem? It's not good to have a program specifically designed for 3+ years of non-stop continuous observation to have intermittent gaps in its observations!
NASA should have unticked the "apply updates automatically" those service packs are a killer.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I have to apologize. After reading the "smelloscope" tag under the summary, I could not help but hear the voice of Professor Farnsworth in my head while reading your post. For some reason, I can't read your post any other way now. I'm sure your post is well thought-out, and indeed informative, but I just can't take it seriously with that voice!
That's ok. I'm reading your post as Leela.
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.
No, I really can't imagine that.
Imagine the headline "Life Discovered on Earth-like Planet 25 light years away". Your typical newspaper-reading/internet-news-scouring/cable-news-watching connected person will know of it immediately. They may not understand the details, they may not have followed the whole saga, but they'll know and they'll find it interesting, because its clear-cut, easy to understand, and impressive.
After that, the last connected folks will hear about it through discussion. "So did you hear about that planet they found with life?" makes a much better conversation than "So what about this weather?", yet is something you might say to someone in the elevator.
Think of how much the general public cared about the non-issue of re-classifying Pluto. Discovery of extra-terrestrial life is much more important and just as easy to understand, and is such a leap beyond our current knowledge. That's not say that it would be the existential, world-changing discovery that I believe proof of intelligent life would be, but people would care.
In fact, science is cheap, comparing to the lumps of money we waste on: