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Hunt For Earth-Like Planets Delayed

Posted by Soulskill on from the death-star-needs-new-brake-pads dept.

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.

5 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. head scratch... by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but the team has to fix the software

    Why can't we just develop software on the ground to post-process the data?

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    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:head scratch... by Cedric+Tsui · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Dunno. Maybe there's too much data to transmit, so they do much of the data processing on the satellite.

  2. Re:riskier to fix on the ground? by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Basically, while the telecope was still on the ground, any delays could mean invoking the budget cutting ire of funding agencies, and the lauch could have been scrapped. Now that it's up there, they don't really have to worry about that sort of thing anymore.

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    May the Maths Be with you!
  3. missing the point by confused+one · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:What's wrong with this planet? by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nothing. But just because Canada is okay doesn't mean I don't want to visit Europe.