Kepler Mission Could Detect Exomoons

Lord Northern writes "According to several news sources, NASA's Kepler mission is said to be able to detect habitable moons orbiting planets in other star systems. Kepler is a space telescope designed to detect exoplanets. Its mission will have it orbiting the Sun for 3.5 years, after which we'll be able to tell if any of our neighboring stars actually have planetary systems around them. However, apparently we will be able to detect not only exoplanets, but also exomoons orbiting those exoplanets. The Kepler team came to that conclusion after running a computer simulation which found that the telescope was sensitive enough to detect the gravitational pull of an orbiting moon (PDF). This means that the data expected by the end of the mission is going to be very rich, and it is said that moons as small as 0.2 times the mass of earth could be detected. Further details about the Kepler mission are available from NASA."

Comments

its a shame

[chucklebutte]

That my generation (I'm 27) will never get to space, at the current rate nasa is being funded. Id kill to go to space or to another planet. I wish that instead of wasting money on worthless crap we focus more on ditching this rock and finding a better rock! Seriously though going to space would be total pwnage hopefully we will be able to do some 6th day shit and clone ourselves till the day we can go to another planet!

Re:its a shame

[bradbury]

If you are 27, then you must have heard about Eric Drexler and Molecular Nanotechnology. Indeed Eric's master's thesis at MIT was on the subject of solar sails and Eric wrote a number of papers [1] about how MNT would enable inexpensive space access.

If you really wanted to go to space you might consider spending less time on wishful thinking and more time on constructive activities. If you were to use the existing (free) Nanoengineer-1 molecular design software to design the nanoscale parts which are elements of a nanoassembler (Nanosystems, pg 401) we would all get there much faster. Once we have a complete nanoassembler design, it can be simulated on a supercomputer to verify that it will function as described and then the race will be on to figure out how to build one [2].

Of course inexpensive access to space and molecular nanoassemblers (or disassemblers) opens up a different can-o-worms like "Which planets we should disassemble to build a Matrioshka Brain for the Kardashev Type II level civilization?" But I suppose if you are still thinking along "vacation in suborbital space" lines that you may not have gotten to that point yet.

1. http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/Authors/Engineering/Drexler-KE/index.html
2. It would take more space than is available here to explain what directed molecular nanoassembly enables but if you consider that DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase and the ribosome are three examples of specific molecular nanoassemblers that produce everything that is considered to be "living", you might get the general idea.

Re:Correction for the summary

[zoso1132]

Very nice catch. You are correct. I do mission operations for Kepler (at LASP) and I remember being trained/briefed on the engineering side of things about a year ago. One of the principle investigators (PIs) was there giving an overview of the science and he mentioned "star wobble" as an alternative method of exoplanet detection. Given the numbers he was throwing around talking about Kepler's sensitivity to light (which is outrageously good, at that), someone asked if it could detect "star wobble." He sorta glumly looked back at the guy asking the question and said, "Nope. Wish we could."