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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.
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..."
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.