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Hunt For Earth-Like Planets Delayed
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from Nature News:
"Kepler, NASA's mission to search for planets around other stars, will not be able to spot an Earth-sized planet until 2011, according to the mission's team. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope's electronics. ... The problem is caused by amplifiers that boost the signals from the charge-coupled devices that form the heart of the 0.95-metre telescope's 95-million-pixel photometer, which detects the light emitted from the distant stars. Three of the amplifiers are creating noise that compromises Kepler's view. The noise affects only a small portion of the data, Borucki says, but the team has to fix the software — it would be 'too cumbersome' to remove the bad data manually — so that it accounts for the noise automatically. He says that the fix should be in place by 2011."
Mindful of Halloween's approach, NASA has put up a piece looking at some of the already-known exoplanets that wouldn't be very friendly to human life.
but the team has to fix the software
Why can't we just develop software on the ground to post-process the data?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That's alright. I'll have another glass of this sherry, and warm me arse by the fire with the hounds.
By the time day is out, we'll have roused to the horns and have the skin of these planets stretched for the drying, before the groom is done brushing nettles from the tail of the ol' horse.
Now, where'd I lay that toothpick? I could use another one of those delightful sandwiches!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That ought to fix the problem.
At least, that's what they claim.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I was thinking more along the lines of ear plugs...
I think we can wait another couple years.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'm from Tahiti so I might have missed something in the translation, but what is wrong with this planet?
"according to the mission's team. "
owned by Space Nazis.
Go Energia !
Yours In Petrograd,
Kilgore Trout
I wish my project time lines gave me 3 years to fix a bug!
Whew! I almost thought my home planet would soon be discovered! Silly humans...
Holy happy hippy crap!
Sounds like the project might have inadvertently discovered the higgs boson at some point in the future.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
That pushes back the date I'll actually be able to visit those planets by at least two years!
What? You say we weren't planning on doing anything useful with the data anyway? Well in that case... who cares?!?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Thety will just have to hunt for Pluto-like planets?
But in the end, he says, the team thought it was riskier to pry apart the telescope's electronic guts than to deal with the problem after launch.
Can someone explain to me why this was the case?
...that no planet's signature will approximate a noisy amplifier.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
2 years delay to analize that data... for?
Communicate? Will take a lot of years to do a "conversation" if there happens to be intelligent life there
Getting there? Still a lot to develop to be able to do such trip for human beings, just doing the technology to make us able to live for years or generations to get there is something potentially more important than finding a "good enough" planet out there. For machines the technology could be ready or close enough, but still, would be a version of the communicate option, once the ship its there.
Why are we wasting so much money trying to find planets we can't get to? We should be looking for the Stargate instead. Sure we might get targeted by the snake heads but you'd be amazed what you can do with a little C4, a P90, and the occasional nuke. Throw in a language nerd and a hot chick... This at least is doable.
I want this account deleted.
Are we making a public excuse so that the images of Planet Nirubu or Planet X are not presented to the public?
I thing there's a bit of misunderstanding here... Point of fact, it will take several years worth of data to identify a rocky planet in the habitable zone anyway. Why? Because your looking for a planet which you must identify as it makes several passes in front of it's star, a planet whose orbital period is going to be on the order of... a year. (depending on the star's output, of course). So, perhaps they're saying that the earliest they would be able to identify an Earth like planet would be 2011. Yes, I read the article but I think the author may have misunderstood. And let us not forget that this only affects some of the channels.
We should build Cylons first, then go exploring for habitable planets.
The Earth is a DEATH TRAP!
At some point, human life on Earth WILL be wiped out. To continue the species, we need to get off this rock. Further, our solar system is a death trap.
Eventually, a gamma ray producing star will focus on our entire solar system gamma rays that will destroy all life. If we get lucky, that won't happen and just our Sun will turn into a Red Giant and expand into Mars' orbit. The Earth will be burned up.
We need to get as far from here as possible. Like any trip, the journey begins with the first step.
Being from Tahiti, I would have thought you'd be planning ahead. The whole rising oceans thing should be important to lots of Tahitians about now.
The Kepler Mission is actually doing very well, producing planetary discoveries that will be announced early next year, and expects to meet all its science goals. Data from the low level noise in a few of the 84 channels will be corrected prior to the time that an Earth twin could be found. William Borucki, Kepler Science Principal Investigator