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Kepler Mission Finds 752 Extrasolar Planet Candidates
An anonymous reader lets us know about the initial release of data from the Kepler spacecraft, launched in the spring of 2009, which has been hunting extrasolar planets. The instrument has found 752 candidates to examine in its first 43 days of operation. This is exciting news, because even if only half of the possibilities pan out as exoplanets (as the Kepler team expects) the results would still almost double the count of known planets. And some of the new ones could be Earth-sized, or not too much larger. Controversy has erupted however because NASA has decided to allow the Kepler team to withhold 400 of the best candidates for its own examination, releasing about 350 others to the worldwide community. The reasons for this are complicated and the New York Times does a good job of digging into the issue of proprietary vs. public data. Nature.com first reported two months ago on the decision to hold back some of the data.
If you do a search there appears to be anywhere from half to two thirds of the data that are marked as proprietary data which their search help gives a brief explanation of:
Clicking on entries in this column will mark the entry for retrieval. To mark all entries, click one of the buttons labelled 'Mark All','Mark public', or 'Mark Proprietary'. (Unmarking all entries can be done the same way using the appropriate button.) For missions with proprietary data, the mark button element will have a yellow background and a '@' symbol to indicate data sets not yet public.
I think the majority of those that are unreleased are simply Q2 data or later since this data is just from the first 42 days of the mission. What's available as the tar file appears to be all Q0 and Q1 data so I'm not certain if the 400 that are 'censored' are included in that or not. If they are withheld it seems odd that the announcement, release notes and README file make no mention of this. Still, we're talking 12+ GB of compressed data here.
Overall and despite the reported censoring of the best candidates, I personally applaud their transparency here that surpasses anything another government related organization (or even scientific field for that matter) exhibits. Alright, maybe CERN or the LHC will be as transparent or more transparent but this is still pretty impressive.
My work here is dung.
I'm wondering if all this effort in discovering exoplanets is getting us any closer to a better estimate of the fp (fraction of stars that have planets) factor of the Drake Equation. Obviously, a complete survey of the sky isn't practical, and we know that some exoplanets are going to be undetectable, and it might also be skewed by the scientifically minded looking closer at stars likely to have planets rather than stars unlikely to have planets, but at the same time we have a lot more to go on than we once did.
I am officially gone from
NASA is not a scientific organization. It is a political organization.
New boss. Same as the old boss.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
"All these worlds are yours, except for this list of 400. Attempt no landings there."
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
NASA is indeed a scientific organization. I know a decent number of people who have/currently do work for NASA, due to my step father being an electrical engineer for Orbital (formerly Fairchild) (he helped design some of the tools used in the earlier Hubble Repair Missions. He no longer works there [he is, for all intents and purposes, retired at this point], but he worked for Fairchild/Orbital for a little over 20 years.) They are a dedicated, unbelievably intelligent group of people, who are amongst the most passionate people in the whole country.
The people in charge of their funding, those are the folks that are political. The people who actually work for NASA are just trying to utilize what little freedom they have been given.
Living With a Nerd
if china or al qaeda get information about where exoplanets are, its not like bin laden is going to go there to hide. there's little anyone can do about exoplanets right now except look at them, and it will be this way for generations to come
but if the scientific research were about nanotechnology or particle physics, meanwhile, i would expect everything to be censored, as it should be, even if funded with tax dollars
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
research because of data access problems (well, and the pay). Senior researchers get
first crack at the data, then the next level gets access, finally grad students get
the detritus to pick over. The argument is that that was the reward for all the work
the senior researchers had to do to get the project funded and underway. Could
be true I guess.
Do we get to vote on which ones are awarded planetary status? Or is that just the IAU.
I am still annoyed about Pluto getting voted off the list of planets...
... are belong to us.
752 possible planets! W00t! That's very cool. And the planets with an orbit of well over 1 year are probably not even found, so the number will shoot up even more. Awesome.
I don't care whether NASA keeps some data for themselves. They don't plan to occupy/invade/colonize anyway (too far away). So, they must simply want to publish the data themselves after looking at it a bit more. Let them. I'm not gonna do it myself anyway.
Pretty sure you can't patent a celestial body. Also pretty sure that some idiot will try.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
...which of the 752 I, as a tax paying American, didn't pay for, and I'll tell you which ones you can keep.
NASA shielded people with political pasts of the good of US science.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I work in government research (not NASA, but a different department) and withholding data for a time period (usually 6 months or so) is the norm -- the people who do the research want to receive credit for that research, rather than publishing the data, someone else writing on it and publishing and receiving credit without doing the research.
If by "cancel", you mean "increase the budget of", then yes. It's only Constellation that's getting canceled. Science is getting a boost.
We're in the nascent stages of considering what's the next thing to investigate. Granted, we're a HUGE step away from being able to do anything with the data we find (like send a probe, etc.).
Nevertheless, if you think this ISN'T going to play out *precisely* the same way that the discovery/exploration/exploitation of the New World did (ie entirely based on greed + geopolitics), then I'd love to hear your assumptions about essential changes in human nature since the 16th century.
-Styopa
This is standard operating procedure for major spacecraft missions. Cassini and Galileo missions to Saturn and Jupiter did the same thing. Kepler's choice of the word "proprietary" is unfortunate: Cassini and Galileo used "embargoed", which is less of a Slashdot buzzword.
To understand why it works this way, you need to realize that your average spacecraft scientist will spend their *entire career* designing and implementing one mission. Two if they're lucky.
So suppose you've been working on making the Kepler mission a reality since 1990. Every day for 20 years you've spent designing instruments, writing proposals, doing proof-of-concept studies, to make it happen. Then one day, the mission launches, and you release data to the public in realtime. The next day, some random dude like myself hits your website, happens on just the right file, writes a quick note to Nature, and gets the credit for discovering the first Earthlike extrasolar planet. You get a brief mention in the acknowledgements.
Folks on Slashdot are used to thinking of the value of data as measured in pennies or dollars. This data's value is measured in lifetimes. Without this sort of "embargo" system, no scientist could afford to pursue a multidecadal project, and cool things like Kepler wouldn't happen.
Canceling the manned spaceflight program isn't the same as canceling the space program.
Nothing GNU here, please move along.
To be fair, they ARE going to double-check the data to make sure they don't have false-positives.
I guess it is somewhat important to validate scientific observations.
Most of the previously-discovered exoplanets are Jupiter-sized, and many are in close and/or eccentric orbits which would seem to preclude Earth-like planets. BUT this MIGHT have been due to sampling bias from the methods we'd been using. So this mission was really important to determine if big, disruptive planets in close orbits were the rule (thus making Earth-analogs less common) or an exception that was just easy to detect.
What this mission seems to show so far is that - at least for very close orbiting planets - rocky worlds are much more common than gas giants. This is a very, very good sign, because if the 1/R^2 relation holds at orbits around 1 AU, there will be about as many systems with Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone as there are systems with larger (2+ Earth-radius) planets. Combining what we learn here from what we've learned before, it seems that *when* big planets are in closer orbits than they are in our solar system, they tend to have disruptive orbits, *but* these are not the common case.
The big question will be where the 1/R^2 relation between planetary radius and frequency shown in this study breaks down. In our solar system, there are two Earth-sized bodies, a number of bodies between 1/4 and 1/2 Earth radius (especially if you count moons), and many, many smaller bodies. But the smallest body in a planetary orbit is only about 1/3 Earth size. Again, this could be error due to very small sample size but there is probably a minimum mass/radius to achieve a stable, clear orbit; I'm still guessing it's considerably smaller than Earth, however, and so our chances of finding Earth analogues in habitable orbits is hopefully quite good.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/384/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...some NASA scientists commented on global warming, which many conservolibertarians believe is an international conspiracy by 90% of the planet's scientists, so from their point of view, NASA has been "political" in the past, and you're not going to be able to dissuade them from that conclusion.
Most of these data were just a single transit. Some could have been a non-orbital passing objct, a sunspot, etc.
It would take 2-3 years to verify an Earth-like planet, so 700 already is amazing.
Is "h-congruous" a scientifically accepted term? I've only ever seen it when reading Peter F Hamilton's books.
"This is exciting news, because even if only half of the possibilities pan out as exoplanets (as the Kepler team expects) the results would still almost double the count of known planets.... Controversy has erupted however because NASA has decided to allow the Kepler team to withhold 400 of the best candidates for its own examination, releasing about 350 others to the worldwide community."
So by the Kepler team's estimation, they're giving the worldwide community nothing?
It would be a real shame if you don't hire them.
Just after they finish up the Capricorn One project data.
I hope more people share my opinion that finding and characterizing exoplanets is THE most exciting scientific field of our time. My elderly astronomy professor at Stockholm University said three years ago that he hoped to live to see the day when they discover alien life the first time.
His explained that all the evidence is out there - all we need is better instruments. With Kepler we can now find many more planets. If some of them turn out to be of roughly the same size as Earth and in the habitable zone, the next thing to do would be analyzing the atmospheric spectrum of the planet. Presence of free oxygen in such a spectrum would be a VERY strong indication of life. Oxygen is highly reactive and if not for the constant re-supplying of free oxygen by plants, the percentage of free oxygen in the atmosphere would be next to nothing.
Best thing of all is that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to measure spectra from exoplanets (maybe just jovian planets though, not sure on the details so someone please enlighten me). This means that with extreme luck, the first discovery of alien life could come as soon as 2014 (not that I actually believe that, but just so you get a sense of the timescale.) Extra-terrestrial life has for a long time had a reputation of being a subject for philosophers and conspiracy theorists, but this isn't sci-fi or some far-flung ideas that will never work - this is real science and we're doing it now.
The next few decades could very well turn out to be the most exciting years ever in the history of astronomy. I just wish more people could realize how cool this really is.
It is also a GOVERNMENT organization. Which implies that as "works of the United States government," the data is not covered by copyright, leaving aside the fact that mere data probably isn't copyrightable anyway.
This is ridiculous. What are they going to do, if not publicise the information --- go conquer the planets for themselves?
Yeah, but engineers are not scientists. Nasa is certainly a bunch of engineers.
And I'm still paying. I don't care what the reasons are, I'm a taxpayer and I'm paying for your fucking science project. I OWN the results motherfuckers. Get outa your babyseats and give me what I'm paying for. End.
How long before one of these candidates gets elected in South Carolina?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Some science is getting a boost. Mostly earth observing sciences. Astrophysics is taking a cut.
This will start another trial over hacking and the publics' access to their own data from their own govt. satellites.