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.

Comments

Data Archives

[eldavojohn]

Here is the notice they are releasing potential extrasolar planetary data and the press release saying that it's data on 156,000 stars. You can search the data or just download the tarfiles via anonymous FTP:

ftp archive.stsci.edu
cd /pub/kepler/lightcurves/tarfiles

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.

Re:Data Archives

[DerekLyons]

If you do a search there appears to be anywhere from half to two thirds of the data that are marked as proprietary data

Overall and despite the reported censoring of the best candidates

It's long been NASA policy that the PI and his team (the guys who've spent the last ___ years or decades bringing the instrument to fruition) get first crack at the data, which usually amounts to six months exclusive access. After that, the data is publicly released.
 
So it's neither censorship nor proprietary data in the usual senses either term are used in, so please be a bit careful in choosing your verbiage and making implications.

Re:Data Archives

[toby34a]

Mod this guy up. NASA will release the data in its entire form eventually, and in perpetuity once they get the first paper out of it. This is the same whenever NASA puts up a new satellite - they get the data, analyze it, publish the initial results, and release the entire record, for free, for anyone in the world to download. So there's an embargo period- it's not long, and it's not that significant. They are better at putting out free data (as is NOAA/NWS) then anyone else in the world- the Europeans and Chinese are exceptionally hard at getting data out of without paying for it or knowing someone behind the scenes. Anyone can download a GOES image or MODIS image from NOAA or NASA in the span of minutes to hours. It takes days (or months) to get SEVIRI or MERRA imagery from EUMETSAT.

Re:Data Archives

[Bacon Bits]

Exactly. It's only fair that the people who worked on the project get the chance to be credited with at least a few of the important discoveries.

Want first crack at the data? Launch your own satellite. Otherwise get in line.

Drake equation?

[dkleinsc]

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.

Re:Drake equation?

[Chris Burke]

Secondly, the articles I have seen tend to imply that planets are much more plentiful than has been thought, and this is a big problem, because even the post pessimistic attempts at the Drake equation have the galaxy teaming with life. If planets are even more plentiful than previously assumed, then that should equate to even more life, so where is everybody?

The galaxy could be teeming with life, it could even be teeming with intelligent life, and yet we could be completely oblivious to the fact.

This is only a shocking and serious problem if you had assumed that intelligent life would inevitably discover a way around the speed of light.

Think about it -- we're are only just able to identify the existence of planets around other stars, not even ones like ours that are at a comfortable distance from their stars, and still only in a tiny area of the sky. And we can do little more than identify their period and their mass. Actual spectroscopy of exoplanets is at an even more infant stage than simply finding them. The rocky planets we already know of could be teeming with life, and we just have no way of knowing yet!

So the only way we'd know about some advanced civilization is if they were spamming the galaxy with transmissions and probes, and the wave front/probe passed us during the narrow window during which we've been looking. And look at us -- the amount of radiation we as a civilization are blasting out into space has vastly reduced as we've figured out how to be more efficient, or replaced broadcast transmission with fiber-optic cables and so on. So the brief period of time in which we've been looking would have to coincide (accounting for distance) with the brief period in which they were broadcasting enough for us to see. And they have to have been close enough for us to be able to see. And we have to have noticed.

Hell, how do we know that an alien probe, launched thousands of years ago, didn't pass through our solar system just last year?

I'm not about to get all despondent about the Drake Equation based on the logic of "Well why haven't we seen alien life already?" Let's wait until we can do enough research on our own to get even the sketchiest idea of how common life itself is before we start getting worried about why aliens haven't said hello, okay?

NASA is just acting on orders:

[tverbeek]

"All these worlds are yours, except for this list of 400. Attempt no landings there."

Re:Earth to slashdotters

[Pojut]

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.

Approximately 50% of your base...

[moondawg14]

... are belong to us.

Re:Woooow! oh my....

[Convector]

If by "cancel", you mean "increase the budget of", then yes. It's only Constellation that's getting canceled. Science is getting a boost.

Standard procedure

[goodmanj]

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.

Re:Candidates?

[Narishma]

if it orbits a planet it is a moon

Not necessarily. It could be a giant space station.

We could find alien life pretty soon

[Hazelfield]

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.