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.

Comments

head scratch...

[girlintraining]

but the team has to fix the software

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

Re:head scratch...

[Cedric Tsui]

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

Re:head scratch...

[cheesybagel]

Yep, the issue is bandwidth. The downlink does not have enough capacity to send the daily produced photographs for ground processing, so the satellite does on-board image processing on the photographs and just sends the results back to Earth. Consider the SuperWASP system generates 100 GB per night and you will get an idea of the amount of data being processed for this kind of application.

Re:head scratch...

[bughunter]

I used to design these kinds of cameras, and there are at least two potential reasons why this can't be done on the ground:

Firstly, and most likely, there's an essential step that needs to be done in the camera hardware. Perhaps something related to Correlated Double Sampling or Pixel Binning needs to be adjusted. In the first case, the signal and reset measurements need to be done as close together as possible to reduce 1/f noise, which can quickly dominate the noise side of the SNR expression, and it may be the timing of these measurements that is at fault. In the latter case, there would be a sqrt(N) penalty for measuring the charge on each pixel and then adding the N pixels together. Conversely, reading each pixel multiple times may be necessary to overcome an unexpected noise source - a sqrt(N) improvement in readout noise can be had by measuring the pixel N times and calculating the average of the measurements. All of these adjustments can only be made at the camera; there's no way to accomplish this after the data has been digitized and radioed to Earth.

2 - Bandwidth. There's just no bandwidth available to ship down the raw data so it can be processed on Earth. The spacecraft must send down reduced data and derivative results. Therefore, these corrections need to be made onboard.

These reasons aren't necessarily exclusive, either... both could be true.

Hunt? Delayed?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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!

What's wrong with this planet?

[PocariSweat1991]

I'm from Tahiti so I might have missed something in the translation, but what is wrong with this planet?

Re:What's wrong with this planet?

[fiannaFailMan]

I'm from Tahiti so I might have missed something in the translation, but what is wrong with this planet?

You're absolutely right. You have missed something. We already know where this planet is and hence don't have to go looking for it.

Re:What's wrong with this planet?

[bakawolf]

It seems to have a nasty infestation of Homo Sapiens. Known for causing all sorts of problems, and terribly hard to get rid of.

Re:What's wrong with this planet?

[Monkeedude1212]

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

Home planet...

[stakovahflow]

Whew! I almost thought my home planet would soon be discovered! Silly humans...

Higgs

[mooingyak]

Sounds like the project might have inadvertently discovered the higgs boson at some point in the future.

Re:Damn!

[belthize]

That's not how project management works. The visit date is still the same, you just have two less years to implement.

Oh we'll need to cut your implementation budget by 20% as well to account for some unexpected metal price fluctuations and fully fund the HR and Fiscal department re-baselining.

Re:riskier to fix on the ground?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

missing the point

[confused one]

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.