http://kepler.nasa.gov/ Latest News from Kepler en-us 253 News /Mission Manager Updates /NASA Kepler News /Kepler in the News /News About Planet-finding Category: NASA Kepler News
Following the apparent failure of Kepler's reaction wheel 4 on May 11, 2013, engineers were successful at transitioning the spacecraft from a Thruster-Controlled Safe Mode to Point Rest State. The spacecraft has remained safe and stable in this attitude and is no longer considered to be in a critical situation. Read the full update.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Reaction wheels ...are simple devices, at least in concept. But making ones that can survive the rigors of a rocket launching and then spin for a long time to keep a spacecraft properly oriented — in Kepler’s case, to keep its telescope precisely pointed at the same field of stars — is difficult. Article in the New York Times by Henry Fountain.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA will host a news teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT/1 p.m. PDT, today, May 15, to discuss the status of the agency's Kepler Space Telescope.

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA's website.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Update on the status of the Kepler Spacecraft. At our semi-weekly contact on Tuesday, May 14, 2013, we found the Kepler spacecraft once again in safe mode. ...data appear to unambiguously indicate a reaction wheel 4 failure, .... The spacecraft is stable and safe. See the Full Mission Manager Update.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The method is called relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection/emission modulations (BEER), and opens up new discovery possibilities for astronomers.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Kepler’s discovery of hundreds of planet candidates around other stars has inspired a new book that combines both science and science fiction: A Kepler’s Dozen: Thirteen Stories about Distant Worlds that Really Exist. This anthology is co-edited by David Lee Summers (author of The Pirates of Sufiro and editor of Space Pirates) and Dr. Steve Howell (Kepler Project Scientist).]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
During a scheduled semi-weekly contact on Friday, May 3, 2013, engineers discovered that the Kepler spacecraft was in a self-protective state called a safe mode. The spacecraft was returned to science data collection just before midnight on Monday, May 6, 2013. See Full Update.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
The May 6th issue of Scholastic's weekly magazine for kids called "Science World" included a section on Kepler. See the article.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Articles in May 2013 issue of Science: Mr. Borucki's Lonely Road to the Light
Kepler-62: A Five-Planet System with Planets of 1.4 and 1.6 Earth Radii in the Habitable Zone
A Gallery of Planet Hunters
And a Glossary of Their Quarry
Observed Properties of Extrasolar Planets
Exoplanet Habitability
A Gallery of Planet Hunters (slide show)]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The team recently completed a monthly science data download...marking the successful completion of Quarter 16 flight operations and the beginning of Quarter 17. The monthly contact also included a quarterly roll of the spacecraft to the spring attitude. ... The team held a NASA-televised press conference on April 18 to announce the discoveries of two planetary systems harboring three super-Earth-size habitable zone planets. See Full Update.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Kepler featured in Science Weekly – Copyright © 2012, Volume 29, Number 1 "Kepler Space Telescope." Featuring six spiraling reading levels for Grades K-6 and Teaching Notes, with hands-on lab activities, using the scientific method, coordinated with math, writing and more for each grade level.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
...by Jonathan Corum, New York Times: This is an interactive showing more than 100 Kepler planet discoveries with a known size and orbit, including five planets orbiting Kepler 62, announced on April 18.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
With Kepler mission's new discoveries of three super-Earth-size planets in their star's "habitable zone" we gather increasing momentum in the ultimate search for planets similar to Earth in size and temperature.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
NASA's Kepler space telescope, in concert with Cornell-led measurements of stars' ultraviolet activity, has observed the effects of a white dwarf star bending the light of its companion red star, an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
PH1 is a four star planetary system hosting a circumbinary planet (PH1b or Kepler-64b) discovered by transits spotted by Planet Hunter volunteers Robert Gagliano and Kian Jek. Megan E. Schwamb is lead author for the disocvery paper, Planet Hunters: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
...the spacecraft continues to operate efficiently, returning high-quality science data. ...The wheel rest period of January 17-January 27 appears to have had no beneficial impact on alleviating the elevated friction in reaction wheel #4. The high-rate data revealed additional transient friction, in the form of torque spikes, in RW4. ...all mitigation steps to preserve wheel life have been implemented, and no additional steps are planned at this time.... See Full Update.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Since returning to science data collection on Jan. 27, 2013, after a 10-day precautionary wheel rest safe mode, the spacecraft has been performing well and continues to make science observations.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star like our sun, approximately 210 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Science article presents a spectrum with molecular lines from water and carbon monoxide from a massive planet orbiting less than 40 astronomical units from the star HR 8799, revealing the planet’s chemical composition, atmospheric structure, and surface gravity. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6126/1398.abstract]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
How close is the nearest habitable planet? A new analysis using Kepler data gives some intriguing insights.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Astronomers estimate that six percent of red dwarfs have a temperate Earth-size planet, as close as 13 light-years away.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
A star thought to have passed the age at which it can form planets may in fact be creating new worlds. The findings were made using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope, a mission in which NASA is a participant.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
After a precautionary "wheel rest" safe mode that began on January 17, 2013, NASA's Kepler spacecraft returned to science data collection at 5 p.m. on January 28, 2013. Read more in the mission manager update.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
On Jan 17, the Kepler team put the Kepler spacecraft in a 10-day "wheel resting" mode, during which time science data collection is stopped and the solar panel orientation aligned with the sun to maintain power. Read more in the mission manager update.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA plays an important role.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Hubble Space Telescope images of a vast debris disk around the nearby star Fomalhaut show a mysterious planet called Fomalhaut b orbiting between 4.6 billion miles and 27 billion miles away from the star, creating a titanic planetary disruption in the system.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
At a press conference at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Long Beach CA, Chris Burke announced new results from the Kepler Mission, including 461 new planet candidates. Francois Fressin presented "At Least One in Six Stars Has an Earth-size Planet"]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
William Borucki, science principal investigator for NASA's Kepler mission at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, is the recipient of the 2013 Henry Draper Medal awarded by the National Academy of Sciences.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Caltech-led astronomers estimate that at least 100 billion planets populate the galaxy.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Space.com article by Mike Wall ... The first truly Earth-like alien planet is likely to be spotted next year, an epic discovery that would cause humanity to reassess its place in the universe.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Kepler-22 b is listed in the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog (http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog) maintained by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL), at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Kepler Participating Scientist Program (PSP), designed to fund community investigations that advance the goals of the Kepler Mission during its extended phase, notices of intent are requested by January 18, 2013, and the due date for proposals is March 1, 2013.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Today Kepler Space Telescope marks two milestones: the successful completion of its prime mission searching for exoplanets and the beginning of an extended mission that we expect to last at least four years, unfolding a census of exoplanets, the ones of greatest interest being other Earths that could already be in the data, awaiting analysis. Kepler's most exciting results are yet to come.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler scientists gave 50 presentations at the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences conference in Reno this week.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A study of exoplanet TrES-2 using 2.7 years of observations by the Kepler spacecraft yield very precise measurements of the host star's size, thus pinpointing the planet's size with unprecedented accuracy.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Planet Hunter volunteers, Kian Jek of San Francisco, Calif., and Robert Gagliano of Cottonwood, Ariz., have helped discover an alien planet with two suns. But this circumbinary system is in turn orbited by two more stars — a star-planet system that is the first of its kind known.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
European astronomers, using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest star system to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
What does this have to do with Kepler, you ask? Article has quotes by Steve Howell, Kepler Deputy Projet Scientist---quotes that are relevant to Kepler. Read on.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Two new "Beehive" planets, Pr0201b and Pr0211, are among the youngest known.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Without Dave Koch's dedication and expertise, the Kepler Mission could not possibly have been as successful as it is, and if truth be told, may not have happened at all.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
2 studies employed Kepler telescope data in studies of the planet orbiting the star KIC 12557548 which is a roughly Mercury-size world being boiled away by the intense heat of its parent star which seems to have a massive dust cloud shed by the planet, similar to the tail of a comet.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler mission has discovered Kepler-47b and 47c, the first transiting circumbinary system — multiple planets orbiting two suns. Moreover, Kepler-47c is in the binary system's habitable zone (where liquid water may exist).]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Transit Timing Variation (TTV) method of planet-finding, first used to discover Kepler-9d (Science online 26 August 2010), is really flowering with submission of two independent papers, currently under scientific peer-review, confirming a total of 41 new transiting planets in 20 multiple planet systems in the Kepler field of view.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler-38b is the fourth confirmed Kepler planet to be found circling a binary star system (a circumbinary planet).]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
IF CONFIRMED, Gliese 581g would be the first known exoplanet that could support life. New York Times article by Dennis Overbye.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Data artist Jer Thorp brings Kepler's discoveries to life with John Underkoffler's gesture-based g-speak spatial operating environment. Article from Sep 2012 issue of Wired Magazine.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
An article by Kerry Ellis for NASA ASK Magazine, Issue #47, Summer 2012. It took nearly 20 years of persistence and ingenuity to prove that Kepler could find exoplanets. Now, with an extended mission to 2016, Kepler's results will be important in guiding the next generation of exoplanet missions. William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at Ames, shares the journey of proving his idea of high-precision transit photometry to search for other worlds today.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Team receives from Space Frontier Foundation the Vision to Reality Award for outstanding achievement in the development and operation of a device, system or entity that forwards the opening of the Space Frontier..]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Researchers measure the orientation of a multiplanet system and find it very similar to our own solar system.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Scientific American article by Ron Cowan, 7/24. "Expectations are running high that some time next year astronomers using NASA's Kepler spacecraft will announce the discovery that planet hunters have been waiting for: the first Earth-size exoplanet found in a region around a sunlike star where life could flourish." ... meantime, "technology and Victoria Meadows of the University of Washington in Seattle are honing-and expanding-the list of compounds that may serve as biomarkers for exoplanets orbiting stars of different sizes and ages."]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Archive recordings now available for the Kepler Symposium that was held 2012 July 19 at Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is a planet called UCF-1.01 two-thirds the size of Earth located a mere 33 light-years away, making it possibly the nearest world to our solar system that is smaller than our home planet.Its diameter would be approximately 5,200 miles (8,400 kilometers)and orbits around GJ 436 at about seven times the distance of the Earth from the moon, with its "year" lasting only 1.4 Earth days.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Principal Investigator William Borucki and the Kepler Science Team are the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's choice for the 2012 Maria & Eric Muhlman Award "for recent significant observational results made possible by innovative advances in astronomical instrumentation, software, or observational infrastructure."]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
David Charbonneau and Sara Seager, members of Kepler science working groups, received the Sackler Prize from the Tel Aviv University.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
The multiwavelength coverage by Hubble and Swift spacecraft has given us an unprecedented view of the interaction between a flare on an active star and the atmosphere of a giant planet.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
One hundred twenty scientists from over 20 countries attended the 5th Annual KASC Workshop to share latest findings including studies of oscillations in red giants, RR Lyrae stars, M giants, and determining masses of stars with planets.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Mission astronomers discovered a star, Kepler-36, with two planets orbiting closer to each other than any other pair of planets in any planetary system found to date. But they are strikingly different types of planets.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA's flagship Pleiades supercomputer just received a boost to help keep pace with the intensive number-crunching requirements of scientists and engineers working on some of the agency's most challenging missions, including processing massive amounts of star data gathered from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, leading to the discovery of new Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A research team led by Lars A. Buchhave has studied the elemental composition of more than 150 Kepler stars harboring 226 Kepler planet candidates smaller than Neptune and found that the occurrence of small planets does not depend as strongly on the metallicity of the host star. This observation suggests that terrestrial-like planets may be widespread in the disk of our Galaxy, with no special requirement of higher metallicity stars for their formation.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
American Astronomical Society (AAS) will hold it's first experimental online oral session at the 220th AAS meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. This allows for attendees from remote locations via the Internet to the Meeting-in-a-Meeting session 306, entitled "Exoplanet Census from Kepler," on Tuesday, June 12th, from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
A new study that put some of Kepler’s thousands of candidate planets to the test using a complementary method for discovering celestial objects in stellar orbits suggest that 35 percent of candidate giants are impostors, known in the planet-hunting business as false-positives.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Kepler team helped in many events where the public could view the transit of Venus.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A study of 63 hot Jupiter systems, planetary systems with Jupiter-size planet candidates in three day orbits found no evidence of small, companion candidates, suggesting that small candidates were ejected from the system, leaving large planets to later circularize into tight orbits.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a "super-Earth" planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward the eventual search for signs of life on other planets.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A paper by P. Muirhead et al submitted to The Astrophysical Journal reports new stellar parameters of 84 cooler late-K and M-type stars in the Kepler Input Catalog. New stellar radii and temperatures obtained through observations using the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory has resulted in new orbit sizes for three super Earth-size planet candidates that place them the habitable zones of the respective host stars.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Kepler team, with the wealth of planet candidates identified to date, is deep into a statistical analysis phase of the mission. The Astrophysical Journal article, Almost All of Kepler's Multiple-planet Candidates Are Planets," by J. Lissauer et al, demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) indeed represent true, physically associated transiting planets.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler's data is archived at MAST, formerly known as the Multimission Archive at STSci, is now the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
In response to the rolling announcement of Kepler's 'four more' years, coverage and response has been enthusiastic with over 170 articles.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Explorer is an innovative app that provides interactive displays of newly discovered planetary systems from Kepler data. Now available free from the iTunes App Store for iPads and iPhones. See UC Santa Cruz press release and Space.com article.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA's Kepler mission has been approved for extension through fiscal year 2016 based on a recommendation from the Agency’s Senior Review of its operating missions.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
...new result from ESO’s HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Not only did the Kepler Launch Clock recently reach the 1000 days milestone, it reached the 1111:11:11:11 milestone.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
An article by S. Rappaport et al entitled "Possible Disintegrating Short-Period Super-Mercury Orbiting KIC 12557548," has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Two articles about transit of Venus 2012 in The Planetarian, Journal of the International Planetarium Society (IPS)]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Mission recognizes Women's History Month]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler mission has been named winner of the 2012 Aviation Week Laureate Award in the Space category, announced last night at the 55th annual black-tie awards dinner in Washington, D.C.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Space Foundation honors NASA Kepler Mission with the John L. "Jack" Swigert Jr. Award for Space Exploration, to be Presented at the 28th National Space Symposium.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler is 3 years old (launched March 6, 2009).]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The NASA Kepler mission has made public 1,091 new planet candidates, bringing the total Kepler planet candidate count now to 2,321. Details are contained in an Astrophysical Journal article.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
A team of astronomers who scan the Milky Way for distant solar systems have concluded there could be thousands, perhaps billions, of "nomad" planets floating through the galaxy with no star like our sun to anchor them.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have added a new type of planet to the mix. By analyzing the previously discovered world GJ1214b, astronomer Zachory Berta (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues proved that it is a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. See Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Release No.: 2012-04]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
As part of Black History Month, John Johnson, scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, discussed his research and recent discoveries, and the path that led him to the work he's doing today.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Janice Voss, who served as Kepler Science Office Director in vital years of the Kepler Mission, passed away on Monday, February 6, 2012.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
...an article by Paul Deans in the Winter 2012 issue of Mercury magazine from Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Download article as PDF.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
The January 26 Kepler news occurred at 1130a PST . By 2pm there were 30 articles; by 6pm there were 60; and by midnight nearly 100 articles covered the announcement. Today (January 27), there are over 200 posted.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
This nearly doubles the number of verified planets and triples the number of stars known to have multiple transiting planets. Most were confirmed Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) without the need for ground based observations, but discoveries in Kepler-33 system are by a very exciting new statistical method of confirming planets in multi-planet systems.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Chris Holmes from Peterborough UK and Lee Threapleton also from the UK found a planet through Planethunters.org in connection with UK television program “BBC Stargazing LIVE”]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size of Mars.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The discovery of Kepler-34 and Kepler-35 establishes a new class of circumbinary planets' and suggests many millions of such systems exist in our Galaxy.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Many news stories about the discovery of Kepler 34b and Kepler 35b as well as KOI-961]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Article by Ron Cowan, Nature. Data from NASA's Kepler space telescope have revolutionized the search for planets outside the Solar System — and are now doing the same for asteroseismology. Studying the vibrations of these distant stars helps us better understand the Sun.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Article by Michael Mecham, Aviation Week and Space Technology. For those seeking life-sustaining worlds far, far away, 2011 was a year of discoveries for NASA’s Kep­ler telescope that culminated with images of the first two Earth-size planets observed outside the Solar System Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Listen to Garrison Keillor (of Prairie Home Companion) in The Writer's Almanac entry for Dec 27, Johannes Kepler's birthday]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Article by Paul Scott Anderson, Universe Today. A University of Arizona press release and article in the journal Nature delineate evidence for two Earth-sized planets around a dying star that has passed the red giant stage. This may shed new light on the destiny of stellar and planetary systems, including our solar system.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Article by Frank Morring, Jr., Aviation Week and Space Technology.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Kepler mission discovered the smallest transiting planets yet found around a star beyond our own. The system is jam-packed with five planets, all circling within a distance roughly equivalent to Mercury's orbit in our solar system. One is almost exactly Earth-size and one is even less—about 7/8 Earth size.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
This Mission Manager update has Kepler Science Conference; discovery of Kepler-22b, our 1st confirmed planet in the habitable zone; and 1,094 new planet candidates, among other things.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
USA Today. See Full Article by Dan Vergano.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
The Jan/Feb 2012 Discover magazine is their annual "Year in Science" and Kepler is #4 for top stories for 2011. The article is "New-Planet Boom Faces a Budget Bust" It describes Kepler's accomplishments.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Kepler team has discovered Kepler-22b, a planet 2.4 times the size of Earth that orbits a sun-like star in 289 days. It the smallest planet yet found to orbit in the middle of its star's habitable zone, which is the region around a star where temperatures are just right for liquid water, a key ingredient for life.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Starting in 2012, all new Kepler Mission Manager Updates will be hosted at the NASA Missions Kepler Site.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
New York Times article prominently features the Kepler Science Conference that is happening December 4-9. Full Article.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Deputy Project Scientist Steve Howell led a research team in discovering that one of the brightest stars in the Kepler star field has a 1.6 Earth-radius planet circling its parent star with a 2.8 day period. With such a short period, and only about 6 million km away from its parent star Kepler 21b is a toasty 1900 K, or 2960 F.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Article in the New York Times about a new exhibit, "Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration," where visitors step “Star Trek” style into the hologram at the end of the exhibit and are surrounded by a thousand points of light that represent the first thousand stars found by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft to have planets.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Kepler Mission is cited in White House response to a petition to White House to disclose the government's knowledge of and communications with extraterrestrial beings (with 5,387 signatures) and petition to formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race (with 12,078 signatures)]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
This is a hot Jupiter-class planet orbiting an active star, with dark spots that are frequently occulted by the planet. From this we find the star rotates in about 12 days, only 8 times the the planet’s orbital period.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
In the November 4, 2011 issue of the Weekly Reader, classes could read about Kepler-16b, the first planet scientists have found that orbits two stars. Students also learned about the spacecraft researchers used to discover the planet.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Busy times are routine for the Kepler project team. ... several more confirmed planets -- Kepler-16b, and the Kepler 18 system (18b, 18c, and 18d). ...Kepler-16b ... confirms that planets orbiting two stars -- called circumbinary planets -- do exist, and we see more emerging from our data. Working on the Kepler-16b announcement was especially unique, since we had a chance to collaborate with Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic for the press conference.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Using data from the Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have detected for the first time cold water vapor enveloping a dusty disk around a young star. The findings suggest that this disk, which is poised to develop into a solar system, contains great quantities of water, suggesting that water-covered planets like Earth may be common in the universe.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A team of Kepler researchers led by Bill Cochran of The University of Texas at Austin has announced the discovery three planets: a super-Earth and two Neptune-sized planets. Kepler-18b is "validated" (by ruling out other possibilities that might masquerade as a planet) , while c and d are "verified" thanks to analysis of their gravitational interactions.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA is celebrating 50 years of space exploration with NASA-themed corn mazes. See Ames press release and NASA Feature on Space Farm 7. Dell'Osso Family Farm in Lathrop CA, one of seven farms across the nation will feature NASA’s Kepler mission. The "Kepler cornfield" opens THIS weekend (noon, Oct 1) and several Kepler team members will be there to give public talks INSIDE the maze.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
NASA needs to extend the lifespan of a very special spacecraft: Kepler, the agency's designated planet-hunter. Kepler is the only mission that can answer an existential scientific question that humans have: how common are other Earths? [Article by Alexis Madrigal, senior editor for The Atlantic] See full article.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Reexamining a group of stars observed by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers say they have identified a trove of candidate planets that are both Earth-sized and potentially habitable. See full article.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Announcement of the planet with two suns made a bit of a media splash....]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The stars are boiling! The reason is the energy generated in the center of the star that wants to escape. If this does not happen quickly enough, the star starts to ‘boil’ in the outer layers causing vibrations that result in light variations, like in the Sun.  Such oscillations have now been discovered by Victoria Antoci and collaborators using the NASA spacecraft Kepler, but in a much hotter star. The scientists publish this in the most recent issue of “Nature”.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA will host a news briefing at 11 a.m. PDT, Thursday, Sept. 15, to announce a new discovery by the Kepler mission. The briefing will be held ...at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The event will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency’s website at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
National Geographic article. Fifty new alien worlds, including 16 "super Earths," have been found...using an instrument called HARPS—short for High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher—at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile. Alan Gould, an astronomy educator at the University of California, Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science, ...[said] "This is looking more and more like a golden age of exoplanet discovery."]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler planet discoveries: Kepler-19b, transits its star every 9 days and 7 hours. It orbits the star at a distance of 8.4 million miles, where it is heated to a temperature of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Kepler-19b has a diameter of 18,000 miles, making it slightly more than twice the size of Earth….
Kepler-19c—discovered because Kepler -19b alternately runs late and early in its orbit due to Kepler-19c tugging on it—could be a rocky planet on a circular 5-day orbit, or a gas-giant planet on an oblong 100-day orbit....]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Nature 477, 142-143 (2011) | doi:10.1038/477142a ...The Kepler spacecraft has hit an unexpected obstacle as it patiently watches the heavens for exoplanets: too many rowdy young stars. ... an analysis of some 2,500 of the tens of thousands of Sun-like stars detected in Kepler's field of view has found that the stars themselves flicker more than predicted, with the largest number varying twice as much as the Sun. That makes it harder to detect Earth-sized bodies.....]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The next release of Kepler data to the public archive (quarter three science data collected from September to December 2009) will be available for download on Sept. 23, 2011 from the Multimission Archive at STScI (MAST). The team recognizes a strong demand from the scientific community for Kepler data, as evidenced by the number of papers on exoplanet science as well as stellar astrophysics that have been published using Kepler data.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Solar panels, data downloads, & upgrades to the processing pipeline (SOC 7.0 & 8.0)]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A Press Release from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA announcing that astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet: Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b that reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
EARLIER THIS YEAR, astronomers announced that, beyond our solar system, there are hundreds of possible planets in a small region of the Milky Way Galaxy. These potential planets range from gaseous planets much larger than Jupiter to suspected rocky planets a few times more massive than Earth. As of September 13, researchers had confirmed 20 of these 1,235 candidates are actual planets. See full article.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Article by Kelly Beatty, Sky & Telescope Magazine. From all accounts, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been an unabashed success since its launch 2½ years ago. ... an astounding 1,235 candidate planets in just the first four months' observations. This cache brims with multiple-planet systems: 115 doubles, 45 triples, and 10 with at least four. ...But brightness fluctuations from the stars being watched by Kepler are ... much more variable than the Sun... the spacecraft would need to amass at least 7 or 8 years of observations — double the planned mission length — to identify all the Earths passing in front of solar-type stars in the spacecraft's field of view.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
… the new nebula (named Kronberger 61, or Kn 61, after its discoverer) is within a relatively small patch of sky being intensely monitored by NASA’s Kepler planet finding mission. … professional and amateur astronomers are working as partners to comb through the entire Kepler field looking for planetary nebula candidates. To date six have been found including this one by Kronberger, a member of the amateur group called the “Deep Sky Hunters.” The group, dedicated to finding new objects in our galaxy and beyond, has found two planetary nebulae in the Kepler field so far (including Kn 61) and a possible third, which, according to Jacoby, “…are extremely rare and each, a valuable gem.” …“Planetary nebulae present a profound mystery” ….]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler-14b is a planet 8 times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting one of the stars in a binary star system. The planet has a short orbital period of just 7 days, while the two stars orbit each other with a much longer period of about 2800 years. The light from the planet hosting star diluted by its companion star significantly affects the derived planetary parameters... and similar dilution effect could significantly affect the derived planetary parameters of other planet discoveries.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Scientific American podcast: NASA's Kepler mission's principal investigator, Bill Borucki, talks about the search for exoplanets that might be habitable. Part 2 of 2.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Monday, July 4, the NASA's Hubble Space Telescope logged its one millionth science observation — a search for water in an exoplanet's atmosphere 1,000 light-years away. Hubble's millionth exposure is of the planet HAT-P-7b, a gas giant planet larger than Jupiter orbiting a star hotter than our sun. HAT-P-7b, also known as Kepler 2b, has been studied by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler observatory after it was discovered by ground-based observations. Full Release at Hubblesite]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Pleiades supercomputer plays a crucial role in Kepler data analysis. ...Pleiades now contains 23,296 Intel(R) Xeon(R) quad- and hex-core processors (111,104 cores in 182 racks) that can run at a theoretical peak of approximately 1.32 quadrillion floating point operations, or calculations, per second. It achieved an official sustained rate of 1.09 petaflop per second....]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
The health of the spacecraft and photometer... is excellent and has recorded more than two months of routine operations in this quarter. The observing efficiency in ... April through June 2011, has been above 97 percent due to two very efficient monthly science data downlinks in April and May-- 16.6 hours and 15.2 hours, the quickest yet! ...Kepler is currently 36.7 million kilometers from Earth. (a bit over 90 times the distance of the Moon from Earth, or about 1/4 the distance from the Earth to the Sun)]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Kepler is a planet hunter, seeking evidence of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. But, Kepler has found a bonus, a treasury of wonders, or one might say a stellar freak show out in space. Kepler's high-precision photometry probes the lives of stars in ways not possible before, and astronomers are being called to mine the rich data from this mission.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
...Every few seconds, the 95-megapixel camera on Kepler measures the brightness of 156,000 individual stars in this area to a precision of better than 1 part in 10,000. ... Kepler is having spectacular success. Its science team has reported 1,235 “planet candidates’’ ...the statistics from Kepler are strengthening the idea that most stars have planets. Team member Geoffrey Marcy estimated that 80 percent of all stars are planet-bearing....]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Geoff Marcy is mad. ... mad at NASA for canceling exoplanet missions like the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). ...Marcy expressed his ire at a recent exoplanet symposium hosted by MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager. "I'm unhappy about the last ten years, and the next ten years," he said. ...While the Kepler mission has been a huge success, and potentially will allow astronomers to discover a truly Earth-like planet, Marcy mourns the loss of other missions that would've helped characterize exoplanets, as well as find planets that Kepler could never detect. "I think the case for TPF is more compelling thanks to Kepler," Marcy said.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Kepler Team had 50 presentations at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Boston, 2011 May 22-26. On May 23, Day 808 of the mission, an AAS press conference included short presentations by five Kepler team panelists: Kepler PI William Borucki, (Introduction), David Latham (on multi-planet systems), Francois Fressin (on Kepler-10c and a new technique for validating planets), Geoff Marcy (with statistical analysis to determine prevalence of various types of planets), and Søren Meibom (on determining a star’s age from its rotation speed).]]> Category: Kepler in the News
NASA's planet-hunting satellite is making the case that it's a small-world galaxy, after all. By John Matson, Scientific American. See Full Article.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler has discovered a second planet in the Kepler-10 star system: Kepler-10c with a radius of 2.2 times that of Earth's, and it orbits the star every 45 days. Even more important, the discovery of Kepler-10c was a accomplished with a new method of validating planet discoveries—a method called "Blender."]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Within just the first four months of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft data collection, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system. David Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics presented findings today in a press conference at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
For many movie stars, their age is a well-kept secret. The same is true of stars in space. Like our Sun, most stars look almost the same for most of their lives. So how can we tell if a star is one billion or 10 billion years old? Astronomers may have found a solution – measuring the star’s spin. Søren Meibom of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics presented findings today in a press conference at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Stars slow down as they age, ...so the speed of rotation is a good measure of a star's age -- and the ages of any of its planets. Homing in on Earth-like planets means finding places that are about the same age as Earth.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
BERKELEY, Calif. (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers searching for alien life say they'll aim radio telescopes at some likely candidates among 1,235 planets discovered by a NASA space telescope. Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley say once they acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets among those found by the Kepler space telescope, they'll ... ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers....]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Tuesday, April 26, the project team reoriented the Kepler spacecraft to downlink data from its solid-state recorder (SSR). All data collected since March 20 was returned successfully. The Quarter 9, Month 1 science data collection download now is complete. ...A total of 93 gigabytes of data was downloaded in approximately six hours before reorienting the spacecraft to science attitude. ...When the spacecraft is turned to a different attitude, the sun shines on different parts of the structure, which causes it to warp ever so slightly. ...When it's maneuvered back to the science attitude, it takes time to settle back to its original shape. ... the total science break, which includes the collection of calibration data, was about 17 hours. The monthly budget is 20 hours. ...Kepler is currently 32 million kilometers from Earth.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
by By Michael D. Lemonick, TIME. ...a project dreamed up by Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer, a veteran planet hunter and Kepler project scientist, has turned out to be so extraordinarily useful. Called Planethunters.org, it lets ordinary folks with no scientific training at all help find planets the Kepler software has missed.... Read Full Article]]> Category: Kepler in the News
The animation that was in the Kepler news story yesterday (Echoes from the depth of a red giant star) is now Astronomy Picture of the Day.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Continuation of news item from 2011 March 17. Science article: Kepler Detected Gravity-Mode Period Spacings in a Red Giant Star, by P. G. Beck et al. - Asteroseismic observations with the Kepler satellite probed the deep interior of an evolved star. See also NASA Kepler Feature story: NASA Kepler Reaching into the Stars.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Star HD 181068 , a 7th magnitude star almost visible to the naked eye is in reality a complex triple system in which three stars undergo mutual eclipses as each of the stars gets behind or in front of the others. The most luminous object is a red giant star around which a close pair of two red dwarfs orbits with a period of 45.5 days. The combined light from the three stars show sharp brightness decreases with a period of 0.9 days produced by the mutual eclipses of the close pair of dwarfs, while it takes 2 days for the close pair to pass in front of or behind the red giant. See also NASA Kepler Feature story: NASA Kepler Reaching into the Stars.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
An international team of asteroseismologists, led by the University of Birmingham, has used data from the NASA Kepler Mission to sample the ‘stellar music’ of 500 stars similar to the Sun, according to research published today (8 April 2011) in the journal Science. The team used the information from these natural resonances, which is coded in pulses of starlight, to measure the properties of these stars and will now be able to compare their findings with predictions based on models of the Milky Way galaxy. ...Dr Bill Chaplin from the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, who leads the international collaboration, said, ... 'Thanks to the Kepler Mission we can measure and weigh the stars and look at the range of sizes and masses.' See also NASA Kepler Feature story: NASA Kepler Reaching into the Stars.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Article in Science by Michael H. Montgomery - Observations with the Kepler space telescope are revealing details of the internal structure of distant stars. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/332/6026/180 See also podcast interview with Michael Montgomery at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6026/180/suppl/DC1]]> Category: Kepler in the News
NASA's Kepler spacecraft is allowing Iowa State University's Steve Kawaler and an international team of astronomers to study changes in the brightness of 500 stars like our sun. The data will give astronomers a much better understanding of the stars, their properties and their evolution. The findings are published in the April 8 issue of the journal Science. Kawaler said, "This helps us understand more about the formation of stars and how they evolve. These new observations allow us to measure the detailed properties of stars at an accuracy that wasn't possible before."]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Space.com (3/31, Choi) scientists using the Kepler telescope "have taken the pulse of red giant stars by measuring their starquakes - stellar shivers that run so deep they can reach a star's core, scientists say." By doing so, the team led by Timothy Bedding of the University of Sydney, hopes to "help scientists separate the vastly different types of red giants that would otherwise look virtually identical, which could help shed light on the future of our sun and the history of the galaxy." ...]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
University of Sydney astrophysicists are behind a major breakthrough in the study of stars known as red giants, finding a way to peer deep into their cores to discover which ones are in early infancy, which are fresh-faced teenagers, and which facing their dying days. The discovery, published in the latest edition of the journal Nature and made possible by observations using NASA's powerful Kepler space telescope, is shedding new light on the evolution of stars, including our own sun.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is Kepler's Suns and Planets by Jason Rowe, Kepler Mission. The image depicts 1,235 candidate planets orbiting other suns since the Kepler mission's search for Earth-like worlds began in 2009, ordered by size from top left to bottom right. Stars and the silhouettes of transiting planets are all shown at the same relative scale, with saturated star colors. ...some stars show more than one planet in transit, but you may have to examine the picture at high resolution to spot them all....]]> Category: Kepler in the News
On the day of the 100th episode of CNN's News Stream--a one hour social media-powered news program that highlights user-generated content--CNN compiled a list of the 100 tweeps (those who tweet) who have informed and inspired their coverage from day one. @NASAKepler and @NASA made the list!]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
After a safe mode event that occurred on March 14 and lasted 144 hours, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft returned to science data collection at 2:45 p.m. EDT Sunday, March 20. ...During safe mode, the spacecraft points the solar panels directly at the sun and begins to slowly rotate along a sun-aligned axis. ...During the spacecraft’s recovery from the safe mode event, the project team performed the spring quarterly roll and downloaded science data collected since Feb. 4....]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Today an international team of astronomers reports the discovery of waves inside a star that travel so deep that they reach the core. The discovery …was possible thanks to precise measurements with the Kepler space telescope. …up to now only waves in the outer part of the star were observed. ...says Hans Kjeldsen of Aarhus university, the coordinator of Kepler Asterosiesmic Science Consortium (KASC). "The measurements provided by Kepler are so incredibly precise that we see things we never saw before. It's like traveling in a whole new world"]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
During a planned contact on March 14, the Kepler spacecraft experienced a safe mode event... a self-protective measure that the spacecraft takes when something unexpected occurs. ...Shortly after the safe mode entry, the team analyzed the spacecraft data and determined all subsystems remained healthy. During recovery actions, the Deep Space Network was used to downlink telemetry and began recovery of files to assist in the anomaly analysis.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Data release, 1,235 planet candidates, Kepler-11 six-planet system, 60 tweeps at Ames 1st Tweetup, SOC 7.0 software, and collecting Quarter 8 data.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
From Discover Magazine blog (excerpt): ...last month, when astronomers with the Kepler space telescope released a list of 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, one particular candidate, KOI 326.01, especially stood out. Scientists, journalists, and the general public couldn’t help it: In a population of planetary candidates dominated by sizzling, Jupiter-sized gas giants—which are much easier to spot—here was the closest thing yet to our very own planet. It was just about the size of Earth, even a little smaller, and had a temperature around 138 degrees—rather warm for human tastes, but still a place where liquid water could rain down from clouds into oceans, and where life as we know it could possibly exist.... Alas, KOI 326.01’s 15 minutes of fame must now end. Additional analysis of the planet’s star now suggests that the planet is a lot larger, and most likely a lot hotter, than previously thought. “The details of the planet need to be hammered out, but this certainly means that this is not an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist, says Natalie Batalha, a Kepler team member....]]> Category: Kepler in the News
from National Geographic "Breaking Orbit" blog. "...If you've been following the exploits of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, you probably already know that the mission finds new planets using what's called the transit method. ...So far, Kepler has confirmed 15 new planets using transits, and an additional 1,200 planetary candidates were recently announced. And next year, people around the world will be able to watch a transit of an Earth-size planet with their own eyes.... OK, fine, I admit—the planet in question is our own Venus. But that's still pretty cool, because Venus transits are exceedingly rare...."]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
56 "tweeps" were treated to a Tweet-up at NASA Ames Research Center, including visits with Kepler mission team members. About half the tweeps were local, but the other half were from 18 states and 5 countries. And they all LOVED Tweet-up! This news item has links to media coverage, posts by the the tweeps, and a selection of tweets from the event.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
The Kepler project team has recovered spacecraft from its Safe Mode event that occurred on Feb. 1, 2011. The spacecraft returned to science data collection after an outage of 64 hours.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Search for articles about the Kepler Data Release and Kepler-11 six-planet system turns up over 980 articles. Dennis Overbye commented in the New York Times article of 2010 Feb 2: "Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a pi–ata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they don’t know what to do with them all."]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
During the scheduled Feb. 1, 2011 contact with the Kepler spacecraft, engineers discovered Kepler was in Safe Mode, with photometer and star trackers powered off. In Safe Mode, Kepler slowly rotates along a sun-aligned axis with solar arrays pointed at the sun. This is a self protection mechanism that the spacecraft enters when something unexpected occurs on the spacecraft. The project team engineers have begun the recovery process to return to science data collection. Updates will be posted as the team makes progress in the recovery.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their stars. The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data, released on Tuesday, Feb. 1. The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. 170 stars show evidence of multiple planetary candidates. Kepler-11 has the most confirmed transiting planets ever discovered and all six of its planets have orbits smaller than Venus, and five of the six have orbits smaller than Mercury's.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Q1 data has been released and Kepler Q2 data will released at 1 a.m. EST on Feb. 2, 2011, and posted to the Multimission Archive at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI; http://archive.stsci.edu/kepler/).]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA will host a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Feb. 2, to announce the Kepler mission's latest findings about planets outside our solar system. The briefing will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. The news conference will follow the scheduled release of Kepler mission science data on Feb. 1, and update the number of planet candidates based on observations conducted between May 2 and Sept. 17, 2009. Presenters are: Douglas Hudgins, (Kepler program scientist, NASA Headquarters), William Borucki (Kepler Science principal investigator), Jack Lissauer, Kepler co-investigator and planetary scientist, Debra Fischer (Professor of Astronomy, Yale University). Reporters also may ask questions from participating NASA field centers or by phone. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole by e-mail at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov by noon EST on Feb. 1.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
In a AAS American Astronomical Society) Newsletter article: The James Webb Space Telescope and the Decadal Survey, Kepler is in a short list of space telescopes in operation (along with Hubble and Spitzer).]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The SETI Institute has a job opening for a Kepler Support Scientist. The successful applicant will be a member of the Science Office working at NASA Ames Research Center. Please see the job posting at the SETI Institute website for details (http://www.seti.org/jobs/keplersupportscientist).]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system. For multimedia see Artist's depictions (still images), Animations, the Kepler-10b Discovery Page, and the Media Telecon Slide Presentation.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A new planet discovery will be announced Monday Jan. 10 during the 'Exoplanets & Their Host Stars' presentation at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference in Seattle, Washington. Natalie Batalha of the NASA Kepler Mission Team will be online answering your questions about this new planet finding on Monday, Jan. 10 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. EST / 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. PST. Natalie will be chatting with you live from the conference in Seattle. Joining the chat is easy. Simply visit this page:
NASA Chat: The Quest for Planets
on Monday from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. EST / 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. PST.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
The Kepler Project Team successfully returned the spacecraft to normal operations on Jan. 6, 2011. The team determined the condition was caused by unexpected noise in the signal from Kepler's sun sensors that erroneously indicated Kepler might be pointing too close to the sun. This was a false alarm, but the team treated it seriously. Kepler was not able to collect science data from Dec. 22, 2010, to Jan. 6, 2011. Kepler's next science data download is scheduled for February 2011.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
In response to the Dec. 22, 2010 Safe Mode event on the Kepler spacecraft, the mission team has brought in several experts and begun a detailed anomaly investigation. The team's initial results are that the Kepler spacecraft appears to be in good condition, and that the on-board fault protection is working as designed. During an initial assessment of the likely source of the anomaly, the team has been able to highlight the circuits most likely to have been involved in causing the safe mode.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
On Dec. 22, 2010, Kepler experienced a safe mode event… a self-protective measure that the spacecraft takes when something unexpected occurs…. The scientific data, collected since the last download of science data in November, was not in danger and had already been downloaded successfully…. Kepler engineers plan for potential loss of up to 12 days of science per year from safe mode events, and the mission is well within that time budget for 2010....]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA will give 100 of its Twitter followers an insider look at its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft and the agency's Ames Research Center on Feb. 11 in Moffett Field in California.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Science, AAAS.
Excerpt:
.... A software application for iPhones and iPads keeps track of exoplanet discoveries; the score crossed 500 as this article was being written. Hundreds more may soon follow as astronomers pursue some 700 candidates that NASA's Kepler space telescope detected in the first few months after its launch in March 2009.
Although most of the planets discovered so far are gas giants, an analysis of the Kepler data has convinced researchers that smaller Earth-like planets abound in the universe and that improved detection capabilities in the coming years will turn up scores of them just in our galactic backyard….
Astronomers expect Kepler to find several Earth-like planets in the next few years. Already, researchers are planning new ground- and space-based instruments to take spectra of the atmospheres of some of those habitable planets….
Full article: Science 17 December 2010: Vol. 330 no. 6011 p. 1620 DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6011.1620.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
New citizen science project from Zooniverse: Find planets around other stars using data from NASA’s Kepler mission. See full announcement on Zooniverse blog.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
The project team discovered Kepler had experienced an anomaly. Kepler was found in coarse point attitude, as opposed to finepoint. Coarse point means the Kepler is using its star trackers for pointing at the Kepler Field-of-View (FOV) instead of the fine guidance sensors that are hard-mounted to the Kepler focal plane array. To properly track Kepler’s target stars with fine accuracy, Kepler must be in Finepoint attitude. The project team was able to recover the spacecraft to Finepoint relatively quickly. Only 13 hours of science data collection were interrupted by this anomaly.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Kepler completed science data download Nov. 22-23, 2010 (Quarter 7, Month 2) ... upcoming quarterly roll of the spacecraft Dec. 21-23, 2010. The 2010 ground-based observing season is completed for the Kepler Mission. Next year’s ground-based observing season will begin in spring 2011. A major paper about Kepler planet candidates is planned in conjunction with the release of Quarter 2 of the Kepler data in February 2011 which will also contain quarters 0-2 for the 400 planetary candidates withheld from the June 2010 data release. The Kepler project is moving the next data release date (originally planned for June 2011) forward to Feb. 1, 2011. See full update.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
A team of astronomers, including two NASA Sagan Fellows, has made the first characterizations of a super-Earth's atmosphere by using a ground-based telescope. ...The findings, reported in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Nature, are a significant milestone toward eventually being able to probe the atmospheres of Earth-like planets for signs of life. The team determined the planet, GJ 1214b, is either blanketed with a thin layer of water steam or surrounded by a thick layer of high clouds. If the former, the planet itself would have an icy composition. If the latter, the planet would be rocky or similar to the composition of Neptune, though much smaller. "This is the first super-Earth known to have an atmosphere," said Jacob Bean, a NASA Sagan Fellow and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. (Planet art by David Aguilar. See source article. See also Scientific American article: Astronomers Get First Peek at Atmosphere of a "Super-Earth" Exoplanet)]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
From AAS Electronic Announcement #214 – November 2010
The Kepler project wishes to inform the community that it is moving the next data release date (originally planned for June 2011) forward to 1 February 2011. This data set (Quarter 2) is the first consisting of a complete 3 months of observations. It will contain light curves for approximately 165,000 stars (most of which are late-type Main Sequence stars) brighter than 16th magnitude in the Cygnus & Lyra constellations sampled at a 30-minute cadence. Three subsets of one-month each of [up to 512] stars were sampled at 1 min cadence. The shorter cadence data will be released on the same schedule.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
By Diana Samuels, Daily News Staff Writer, San Hose Mercury News. Excerpt: … Today, on what would have been Sagan's 76th birthday, NASA Ames' Kepler Mission and the SETI Institute in Mountain View are celebrating his influence with an essay contest. Essay finalists have been posted daily on the Kepler Mission's website for several days, and Renee James, an associate physics professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas, was named as the winner today. …They received about 40 submissions from all over the world, said Natalie Batalha, deputy science team lead with the Kepler Mission. …Several well-known professional scientists and astronomers also participated in the contest as "guest" essayists, including Geoffrey Marcy, whose team at the UC-Berkeley's Center for Integrative Planetary Science has discovered about half of the 350 known planets around other stars, and Sagan's son, science writer Dorion Sagan. …Rui Borges, who lives in Portugal and volunteers on public outreach efforts for the Kepler Mission, developed the idea for the contest. Kepler is a spacecraft operated from NASA Ames, launched last year to survey the Milky Way Galaxy for Earth-size planets. "We are now actively seeking for what is on the other side of the ocean," Borges wrote in an e-mail to The Daily News. "And Carl is here with us. Smiling as we are now ready to, once more, embrace the open sea... We at the Kepler Mission would like to invite everyone to come along with us on this quest, on this journey of discovery and knowledge."]]> Category: Kepler in the News
By DENNIS OVERBYE, New York Times. Excerpt: Both planetary science and cosmology are ripe for big news in 2011, the former in its effort to find planets beyond the Earth and the solar system that could harbor water and thus life as we know it, and the latter in the unending effort to figure out what the universe is made of. …Finding out how common habitable planets are around Sun-like stars is the mission of NASA’s Kepler satellite, …. Last June, the Kepler team released a list of 350 stars thought to be harboring planets, but at the same time, and over the protests of some astronomers, they held back the data on 400 more stars that they wanted to check out over the summer. …The smallest planet on the previous list was about one and a half times the diameter of the Earth. … in an e-mail message Natalie Batalha, a co-investigator on Kepler, said it would not be unreasonable to suspect that there is a smattering of planet candidates smaller than that on the new list. More small planets could also show up as more data is analyzed, she said. ... a recent survey by University of California astronomers, Andrew Howard and Geoffrey Marcy, concluded that about a quarter of all Sun-like stars should have Earth-size planets. If indeed there are Earth-size planets in the Kepler 400, however, Dr. Batalha and others hasten to point out, these would not quite be the planets of our dreams. An Earth-like planet… would take about a year to complete a circuit around a star like the Sun. Kepler … would need an additional year or two to record enough blips to determine that it was indeed in a habitable, water-friendly orbit around a star like our Sun…. Read full article.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) awards the first Lancelot M. Berkeley - New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy to Kepler PI William J. Borucki and Deputy PI David G. Koch. http://aas.org/press/pr2010Nov05]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Principal Propulsion Engineer Beth Sholes at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has won the prestigious Resnik Challenger Medal. The award recognized Sholes for her propulsion analysis and design on several unique missions including the Kepler Space Telescope. Sholes designed a propulsion system that maintains Kepler’s stability and pointing accuracy, necessary for its job of constantly observing 100,000 stars.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
The Kepler project team completed another science data download Oct. 23, 2010.
Kepler is exceeding its 92 percent data completeness goal.
So far, the total number of archive searches of Kepler data is over 700,000.
Kepler also is generating quite a bit of interest in the asteroseismology community. On Oct. 26, 2010, members of the Kepler Asteroseismology Science Consortium (KASC) held a press conference at Aarhus University in Denmark. See replay of the event and briefing of the science results.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
by Howard, Marcy et al. Science 29 October 2010. The questions of how planets form and how common Earth-like planets are can be addressed by measuring the distribution of exoplanet masses and orbital periods. Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/330/6004/653. See also "Solar Systems Like Ours May Be Common" (ScienceMatters@Berkeley, Volume 7, Issue 57).]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Articles appeared in Washington Post, BBC News", Wired, Space.com, ScienceNOW, Los Angeles Times, AFP, Discovery News, Physicsworld.com, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Irish Independent , China’s Xinhua , Universe Today, and Centauri Dreams, Discover Magazine all cover the story.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
WASHINGTON -- Nearly one in four stars similar to the sun may host planets as small as Earth, according to a new study funded by NASA and the University of California.
The study is the most extensive and sensitive planetary census of its kind. Astronomers used the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii for five years to search 166 sun-like stars near our solar system for planets of various sizes, ranging from three to 1,000 times the mass of Earth. See http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/oct/HQ_10-279_Keck.html. See also: UC Berkeley Science Matters article.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
An international cadre of scientists that used data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft announced Tuesday the detection of stellar oscillations, or "starquakes,” that yield new insights about the size, age and evolution of stars. See also: * International Team of Astronomers to Discuss Kepler Findings * Archive of the webcast * Graphics for 2010 Oct 26 webcast]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
WASHINGTON -- The Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC) at Aarhus University in Denmark will hold a media teleconference on Tuesday, Oct. 26, at 11 a.m. EDT to discuss the latest discoveries about stars and their structures using data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft. See Archive of the webcast and webcast graphics.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Snippet: ...A team led by Steve Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, announced two weeks ago the discovery of Gliese 581g, a possible habitable world, one only about three times heavier than Earth. It's orbiting its star at a distance amenable to oceans.... But a Geneva Observatory astronomer, Francesco Pepe, this week announced his team couldn't find the Gliese 581g.... NASA's ... Kepler...team announced 706 "candidate" solar systems had turned up in its first sweep of stars extending out to about 3,000 light years away (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.) ... with more than 100,000 stars to examine ... Kepler looks like it will find something interesting in the next three years, according to Kepler scientist William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif....
[see Full article]]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Sponsored by NASA's Kepler Mission and SETI Institute --||-- Deadline: October 26, 2010 --||-- Awards Announced: November 9, 2010 --||-- Must be 18 years or older --||-- Essay must: be < 1000 words]]> Category: Kepler in the News
"Where we are, I'd expect that by the end of October, we'll be at 500 if things keep going the way they're going," said Jon Jenkins of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. Jenkins is the analysis lead for NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission. And the 1,000th world could be discovered surprisingly soon, as the space-based Kepler mission has already offered up hundreds of planet candidates that await further observation and confirmation.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
The November issue of Astronomy magazine has feature article on NASA Kepler mission.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
“Kepler Science Operations Center” software has won the NASA Software of the Year Award for 2010. In addition to a monetary award, each member of the team will be receiving a Software of the Year medallion after the Software of the Year awards ceremony to be held at the NASA Project Management Challenge on February 9th or 10th, 2011 at the Long Beach Convention Center in Long Beach, California.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A Kepler Mission research paper written to serve as “the standard reference for the mission,” has been determined by Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators (SM) to be the most-cited paper in Space Science and in Emerging Research Front for October 2010. Authored by David Koch, Kepler Mission deputy principal investigator, along with a host of co-authors, “Kepler Mission Design, Realized Photometric Performance, and Early Science” provides an overview of the mission designed to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone (where liquid water could exist) of solar-like stars.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Article in Science 1 October 2010: 51-54. Published online 26 August 2010 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1195778] (in Science Express Research Articles). Two Saturn-size planets show variations in the times they take to transit their star due to gravitational interaction. Authors: Matthew J. Holman, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Darin Ragozzine, Eric B. Ford, Jason H. Steffen, William F. Welsh, Jack J. Lissauer, David W. Latham, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Lucianne M. Walkowicz, Natalie M. Batalha, Jon M. Jenkins, Jason F. Rowe, William D. Cochran, Francois Fressin, Guillermo Torres, Lars A. Buchhave, Dimitar D. Sasselov, William J. Borucki, David G. Koch, Gibor Basri, Timothy M. Brown, Douglas A. Caldwell, David Charbonneau, Edward W. Dunham, Thomas N. Gautier, III, John C. Geary, Ronald L. Gilliland, Michael R. Haas, Steve B. Howell, David R. Ciardi, Michael Endl, Debra Fischer, Gábor Fürész, Joel D. Hartman, Howard Isaacson, John A. Johnson, Phillip J. MacQueen, Althea V. Moorhead, Robert C. Morehead, and Jerome A. Orosz]]> Category: Kepler in the News
by Gregory Laughlin, in Oct 1 issue of Science. Abstract: Launched in March 2009, the Kepler mission is tasked with searching for extrasolar planets. It continuously monitors 156,000 stars in a ~100-squaredegree patch of sky covering a portion of the galactic disk centered on a direction lying in the constellation Cygnus (1). On page 47 of this issue, Holman et al. (2) report the discovery of a transiting planet whose orbit of 38.9 days varies by up to 1 hour due to the interaction with other planets in the system. This Saturn-sized world, known as Kepler-9c, circles a Sun-like star 2300 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Lyra, and is part of a bizarre system containing three transiting planets, whose mutual gravitational tugs generate an exquisitely choreographed orbital dance. Far from being mere curiosities, the planets of the Kepler-9 system may provide vital clues to the mechanisms of planetary formation and orbital evolution.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
A team of planet hunters from the University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of a planet with three times the mass of Earth orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone.”]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Quarterly roll and download of data (Quarter 6) from the spacecraft was Sept. 22-23, 2010. The first month of Quarter 7 science data is expected to be downloaded approximately Oct. 22-23, 2010. Science team members are preparing to announce the mission’s latest discovery in early November. The KASC submitted a total of 16 papers during June 2010, most of which are now accepted for publication in international, peer-reviewed journals.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Within 24 hours after the media telecon of 2010 Aug 26, more then 200 news outlets published information on the new planetary discoveries from the Kepler Mission.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA RELEASE : 10-197
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star.
The transit signatures of two distinct planets were seen in the data for the sun-like star designated Kepler-9. The planets were named Kepler-9b and 9c. The discovery incorporates seven months of observations of more than 156,000 stars as part of an ongoing search for Earth-sized planets outside our solar system. The findings will be published in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
See full NASA release]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Excerpt: Astronomers using ESO’s world-leading HARPS instrument have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets, orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180. The researchers also have tantalising evidence that two other planets may be present, one of which would have the lowest mass ever found. This would make the system similar to our Solar System in terms of the number of planets (seven as compared to the Solar System’s eight planets). Furthermore, the team also found evidence that the distances of the planets from their star follow a regular pattern, as also seen in our Solar System. …The newly discovered system of planets around HD 10180 is unique in several respects. First of all, with at least five Neptune-like planets lying within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars, this system is more populated than our Solar System in its inner region, and has many more massive planets there…. Full article at http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1035/]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
...Overall, the project is quite pleased with performance so far. ...The only expendable resource we have on Kepler is propellant, and estimates are that we have sufficient propellant for another 10 years (well above the 2.5 years remaining in the nominal mission). Currently our most challenging issue as we look out in the long term, is the telecom margin as the spacecraft gets further from the earth. We will have to continue to drop our data rate over time, as the signal strength drops due to distance. Meanwhile, the Kepler Science Team has been quite busy analyzing all the data Kepler has collected to date. There are many planetary candidates that the team must assess and verify as a true planet or a false signature....]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
MEDIA ADVISORY: M10-120 WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a media teleconference Thursday, Aug. 26, at 1 p.m. EDT to discuss the Kepler spacecraft's latest discovery about an intriguing planetary system. ...In June, mission scientists a announced the mission has identified more than 700 planet candidates, including five candidate systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet. To participate in the teleconference, reporters [ONLY] should e-mail J.D. Harrington at by 11 a.m. EDT, Thursday, Aug. 26.
See http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/aug/HQ_M10-120_Kepler_Telecon.html
[For General Public:] Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
A statement was sent from the Kepler Science Council to the NASA Ames Research Center Director.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
New York Times article by Dennis Overbye. See full article at
http://www.nytimes.com/201083/science/space3kepler.html?_r=1.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Statement by Dimitar Sasselov regarding the talk he gave at TED Global 2010 conference in Oxford UK. ("TED" stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design). See more about this on the Kepler blog.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
See from Cosmic Log page on msnbc.com for full article: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/07/26/4756559-millions-of-earths-talk-causes-a-stir]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
NASA RELEASE: 10-167 - WASHINGTON - Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the existence of a baked object that could be called a "cometary planet." The gas giant planet, named HD 209458b, is orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping into space. Observations taken with Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) suggest powerful stellar winds are sweeping the cast-off atmospheric material behind the scorched planet and shaping it into a comet-like tail. …The planet, located 153 light years from Earth, weighs slightly less than Jupiter but orbits 100 times closer to its star than the Jovian giant. …The extrasolar planet is one of the most intensely scrutinized, because it is the first of the few known alien worlds that can be seen passing in front of, or transiting, its star. …During a transit, astronomers study the structure and chemical makeup of a planet's atmosphere by sampling the starlight that passes through it. …COS detected the heavy elements carbon and silicon in the planet's super-hot 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit atmosphere….]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
The project team recently completed another roll of the Kepler spacecraft and science data download. Accomplished over June 22-23, 2010, the operation was a complete success, as the roll placed Kepler in its summer attitude. Kepler mission data collected over the first 43 days of operations were made available at the Multi-Mission Archive at STScI (MAST: http://archive.stsci.edu) on June 15, 2010.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
...by Lagrange et al, Science, AAAS. The 10-million-year-old star ? Pictoris, has long been suspected to host a planet. Through images obtained with the Very Large Telescope, an array of four telescopes located in Chile, Lagrange et al. (p. 57, published online 10 June) now confirm the presence of a young, giant planet, ? Pictoris b, orbiting within the dusty disk that surrounds the star. ? Pictoris b orbits closer to its star than Uranus and Neptune do to the Sun in our solar system. This orbital separation is consistent with the in situ formation of the planet via a core accretion mechanism. Thus, giant planets can form within a stellar dust disk in only a few million years.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
"The problem with finding Earth-like planets," said Stefan Martin, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., "is that their host stars can emit 10 million times more infrared light than the planet itself. ...a "nulling interferometer" observes planets in infrared light, where they are easier to detect. It is designed to combine starlight captured by four different telescopes, arranging the light waves from the star in such a way that they cancel each other out. "We're able to make the star look dimmer -- basically turning it off," Martin said. Nulling interferometry is not a new idea, but what sets the results from Martin and Booth apart is how effective it turned out to be. "Our null depth is 10 to 100 times better than previously achieved by other systems," Martin said. "This is the first time someone has cross-combined four telescopes, set up in pairs, and achieved such deep nulls. It's extreme starlight suppression." Full article with photo at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-207]]> Category: Kepler in the News
The National Geographic program "Alien Earths" which Dana Berry (SkyWorks Digital, Inc.) wrote and produced and aired in the fall of 2009 is a "silver award" winner of the "Telly Awards." Dana Berry created many of the fine animations found on the Kepler website animations page.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler releases info on exoplanet candidates]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA's Kepler Mission has released 43 days of science data consisting of brightness changes for more than 156,000 stars originally targeted in an ongoing search for Earth-like planets outside of our solar system. Astronomers will use the new data to determine if orbiting planets are responsible for brightness variations in several hundred stars. …Some show starspots, which are similar to sunspots, and a few produce flares that would sterilize their nearest planets. …The 28-member Kepler science team also is performing follow-up observations on a specific set of 400 objects of interest. …That data will be released to the scientific community in February 2011. ..."This is the most precise, nearly continuous, longest and largest data set of stellar photometry ever," said Kepler Deputy Principal Investigator David Koch of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The results will only get better as the duration of the data set grows with time." Kepler will continue conducting science operations until at least November 2012, searching for planets as small as Earth, including those that orbit stars in a warm habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet. Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take at least three years to locate and verify an Earth-size planet. "The Kepler observations will tell us whether there are many stars with planets that could harbor life, or whether we might be alone in our galaxy," said mission science principal investigator William Borucki of Ames. To see the released science data, visit the Multimission Archive at STScI (MAST): http://archive.stsci.edu/kepler]]> Category: Kepler in the News
New York Times Online - SCIENCE - By DENNIS OVERBYE As excitement builds about a list of stars newly suspected of harboring planets, some astronomers are questioning why the Kepler team is holding back some of the data.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
May 12, 2010, marked the one-year anniversary of on-orbit operations for Kepler. The team is in the final stages of preparations to release Kepler’s first 43 days of science data to the public at the Multi-Mission Archive at STScI scheduled for 2010 June 22-25. Nearly 3,000 binary star systems have been cataloged. Upcoming papers will discuss planetary candidates, those that are believed to be "false alarms," eclipsing binaries, and stars that have multiple planet candidates.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
First Kepler Science Conference: 2011 December 5-6-7]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Kepler engineers used three ground-stations in NASA’s deep space network, at Madrid, Spain, Canberra Australia, and California, for this month's data download. The Guest Observer Program has evaluated proposals to the Kepler cycle 2. The Science Team continues to analyze data on over 200 planet candidates. With Cygnus now visible, ground-based follow-up observations of Kepler’s candidate targets is underway at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona, McDonald Observatory in Texas, and the Keck 10-meter telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
The Kepler website has been selected as an Official 2010 Webbie Award Honoree.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
The Kepler project team successfully completed another science data download March 19-21, 2010. Project engineers completed a quarterly roll of the spacecraft. The next monthly data download (April 21-23, 2010) will include an update to flight segment software which has been in development and test for a number of weeks, and is ready for flight operations. It will help mitigate errors that might lead Safe mode events.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
By Sarah Nelson, Northwest Science & Technology. Excerpt: To most of us, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" is just the opening of a familiar nursery rhyme. To astronomers looking for planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun, the twinkling of a distant star could mean something much more interesting. Finding planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, is an active area of research in the field of astronomy. …When a planet passes in front of a star, making its transit, the amount of light we see from that star drops by a tiny fraction. Inferring the presence of an exoplanet by detecting this dip in light is known as the transit method. According to University of Washington astronomer Rory Barnes, this technique was suggested a long time ago but only recently applied to exoplanetary discovery. "Just seeing it once, you don't necessarily know if you saw a transit," says Barnes. The second time establishes a period equal to the length of the planet's orbit. A third observation is convincing evidence that there is indeed a planet orbiting that distant sun. In the case where the planet is about as far from its star as the Earth is from the Sun, it would take three years to observe three transits. "You have to be patient, that's the biggest challenge," says Barnes. …The near future of exoplanetary research will be affected by NASA's Kepler Mission, which is aimed at finding Earth-sized, terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone. Launched in May 2009, Kepler has already enabled the detection of five exoplanets via the transit method, from its survey field of roughly 150,000 stars. The mission is expected to find hundreds, if not thousands, of exoplanets before its scheduled 2012 completion, according to Kepler co-investigator Alan Gould. While most telescopes have a field of view the size of a "grain of sand," says Gould, Kepler's is the size of a human hand held at arm's length, … the biggest telescope that has ever been launched into space. Exoplanetary researchers like Barnes await Kepler's findings. "I think Kepler is going to prove some of the biggest advances in our field," says Barnes. "Up until this point, exoplanets have really been a case by case study, there have just been so few of them. Now we'll get to a point where we'll understand their general properties and how our solar system fits in. ...]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Kepler recently marked the one-year anniversary of its launch on March 6, 2009.The project team prepares for another monthly science data download scheduled for March 19-21, 2010, The science team has just begun the follow-on observing season for 2010. The Kepler engineers studying safe-mode events have several mitigations under consideration that should minimize impact to science activities.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
One year ago Saturday, NASA's Kepler spacecraft, built in Boulder by Ball Aerospace, was successfully launched into the night sky to search for planets that could be similar to our own -- other worlds that might support life. Article plus interview with Bill Possel, Director of Mission Operations, can be seen at http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_14521839#ixzz0iGYdDZAi]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
One year ago this week, NASA’s Kepler Mission soared into the dark night sky, leaving a bright glow in its wake as it began its search for other worlds like Earth.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
2010 Feb. Mixing Kepler and Equality. by Kathleen M. Wong, ScienceMatters@Berkeley. Excerpt: A greeting from Star Trek might seem odd from the man leading campus efforts to diversify students, faculty and staff. After all, helping Berkeley recruit, promote, and retain people of color is a full-time job in and of itself. Yet [Gibor] Basri devotes his nights and weekends to his other passion: the stars. A professor of astronomy and an expert on the stellar objects known as brown dwarfs, he is also a co-investigator of the Kepler mission to find rocky, temperate worlds similar to earth. Planet hunters have already found dozens of planets outside our solar system, virtually all gas giants like Jupiter. "All we know about life is that it can arise on rocky planets like the earth," Basri says. "Kepler will tell us a lot more about that kind of planet." In doing so, Basri and his collaborators will move humanity one step closer to finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.Kepler is designed to detect one thing: the dimming of light caused by the passage, or transit, of a planet in front of a star. Observing the transits of rocky exoplanets is virtually impossible with ground telescopes. Turbulence in the atmosphere makes earthbound observations less reliable, and limits observing to nighttime. "It takes a few hours for the earth to cross the disc of the sun when seen from far away. Then you have to wait 365 days for it to happen again. You don't want to be prevented from observing when that occurs," Basri says. Even from space, observing planet transits is a delicate business. Phenomena such as flares and sunspots can drastically alter a star's brightness, making it harder to distinguish planets. An expert in understanding how the light output of stars varies, Basri explains how Kepler overcomes this with an analogy of using the background brightness of all 150,000 observed stars as a yardstick. "The average of all of the stars ought to stay fixed, and you can measure the brightness of each star against that," Basri says….]]> Category: Kepler in the News
By Sheena McFarland, The Salt Lake Tribune. Excerpt: ...Jason Steffen, who is doing post-doctoral research at the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics and who earned his undergraduate degree at Weber State University, visited the Clark Planetarium to share the early findings of the Kepler Mission with a sold-out crowd Monday night of more than 200. "The compelling question is how many Earths are there to date? We don't know that answer, but Kepler is out there to find the answer to that question," Steffen told The Tribune .]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Joe Bauman, Deseret News blog writer. Excerpt: The Kepler probe, launched 11 months ago to hunt for Earthlike worlds around other stars, has already discovered planets, an astrophysicist said Monday night. Although none yet announced is Earthy, five were detected in the probe's first 43 days of taking data -- and eight months have passed since then.
Jason Steffen of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics told a capacity crowd at Clark Planetarium about Kepler's first results, which were announced in January. A graduate of Davis High School and Weber State University, Ogden, Steffen earned his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Washington, Seattle.
...The crowd's size was a pleasant surprise to planetarium director Seth Jarvis. "We are excited to see so many people interested in learning about extrasolar planets," he said. Half an hour before the lecture began, cashiers reported that only about 40 tickets were sold. Then the auditorium filled. "Right now this is the only planet that we know of that is habitable," Steffen said. But that could change within a few years as Kepler's results come in....]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Kepler experienced a safe mode event on February 2, 2010. ...This was the fourth safe mode Kepler has experienced since operations began May 12, 2009. Kepler engineers plan for potential loss of up to 12 days of science per year from safe mode events....]]> Category: Kepler in the News
NASA Ames is currently leading the Kepler mission, an unmanned spacecraft searching for Earthlike planets circling other stars.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Excerpt: Natalie Batalha, an associate professor of astronomy and physics at SJSU, and her colleagues at NASA Ames Research Center may be on the brink of discovering a habitable, earthlike world orbiting a distant star.
For the last ten years, Batalha has been a co-investigator for the Kepler Mission, which has been designed specifically to hunt for habitable planets orbiting stars light-years away in the local region of the Milky Way Galaxy, as well as understanding how these planets came to be.
"The holy grail of the mission is to find an Earth-sun analog," Batalha said. "We want to find a place that looks like home."
Batalha said she and her fellow investigators are looking for planets in what astronomers call the "Goldilocks zone," which is described as the distance around the parent star that is neither too hot nor too cold for life to form....
Photo credit: Thomas Webb]]> Category: Kepler in the News
ABC - KGO news story. Excerpt: MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA (KGO) -- President Barack Obama's budget will have a profound impact on NASA. Its budget is not being cut, but the way NASA will have to spend the money is going to change, and that includes scrapping a new mission to the moon.
When you or your team have discovered almost half the planets in the known universe, there is certain relief at federal budget time in knowing you are safe.
Dr. Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley is a Kepler astronomer and one of many people funded by NASA who viewed Monday's space budget with more than a little curiosity....]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Spreadsheet listing over 100 articles from January 2010.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
London Times Online.
Snippet: Scientists will have detected the first truly Earth-like planet outside the solar system by the end of the year, one of the world¹s leading astronomers predicted yesterday.
Professor Michel Mayor, of Geneva University... said that Nasa¹s Kepler spacecraft, which is carrying the largest telescope to have been sent beyond the Earth¹s orbit, will be the first to find a planet that meets both these criteria. Full article.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
... Astronomer Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, said ..."Kepler is the first one capable of detecting substantial numbers of planets no bigger than the earth. So we will know within two or three years which are Earthlike and in Earthlike orbits in the sense of being the right distance from their parent star."
See Full Article]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Two of Kepler’s 42 CCDs transmitted anomalous data. Additional telemetry is being gathered from the spacecraft to facilitate analysis of the anomaly.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler Receives NASA 2010 Systems Engineering Excellence Award]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA's Kepler space telescope, designed to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, has discovered its first five new exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system. Kepler's high sensitivity to both small and large planets enabled the discovery of the exoplanets, named Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b. The discoveries were announced Monday, Jan. 4, by the members of the Kepler science team during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington.]]> Category: Kepler in the News

• Sky & Telescope:Kepler's First Exoplanet Results
• New York Times: Planet-Hunting Telescope Unearths Hot Mysteries
• Huffington Post: NASA Kepler Telescope Discovers Mystery Space Objects

]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - Kepler Mission scientists will reveal the space telescope's latest discoveries at a news briefing in Washington on Monday, Jan. 4, 2010. The announcement will be made at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST) at a news conference during the 215th national meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Kepler continues to monitor the Cygnus-Lyrae region of the sky for Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of other stars. The Kepler Team successfully completed the third quarterly roll of the spacecraft and another monthly science data download over the Dec. 17-18 timeframe.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
By Marc Kaufman, Washington Post
Excerpt: Hat Creek, Calif. -- The wide dishes, 20 feet across and raised high on their pedestals, creaked and groaned as the winds from an approaching snowstorm pushed into this highland valley. Forty-two in all, the radio telescopes laid out in view of some of California's tallest mountains look otherworldly, and now their sounds conjured up visions of deep-space denizens as well.
The instruments, the initial phase of the planned 350-dish Allen Telescope Array, are designed to systematically scan the skies for radio signals sent by advanced civilizations from distant star systems and planets. Fifty years after it began -- and 18 years since Congress voted to strip taxpayer money from the effort -- the nation's search for extraterrestrial intelligence is alive and growing....
The Hat Creek array, which began operation two years ago, is a joint project of the SETI Institute and the nearby RADIO ASTRONOMY LABORATORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. Made possible by an almost $25 million donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the array is unique and on the cutting edge of radio astronomy. SETI and Berkeley share both the facility, 290 miles northeast of San Francisco, and all the data it collects....]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
By David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle Science Editor.
Excerpt: Two teams of astronomers have detected three new "super-Earths" circling nearby stars - one apparently made of rock and water with a thin, sultry atmosphere somewhat analogous to Earth, but much hotter. That planet is lifeless, but finding it strongly increases the likelihood that before long another distant Earth-like planet will be found orbiting another sunlike star and bearing some unknown form of life, says a leading astronomer at UC Berkeley. The advanced equipment to make the discovery possible is already on the horizon, he said. "Momentous breakthroughs" are in sight, said Berkeley planet hunter Geoffrey Marcy in a commentary on the report being published in the journal Nature today. A Harvard group led by astronomer David Charbonneau reported in Nature that the Earth-like planet the team has discovered is 2 1/2 times the size of Earth. Its innards are made of iron, nickel and silicates, more than half the planet is water, and it probably has a thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, the international team of planet-hunters said.
... Their new planet, designated GJ1214b, is orbiting a small red dwarf star named Gliese1214 in the constellation Ophiuchus, and is 40 light-years from Earth. Its surface is probably about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, twice as hot as any earthly organism - like the creatures called extremophiles that astrobiologists find in geysers and deep, hot mines - could survive. "This planet is too hot for life as we know it," Charbonneau said in an e-mail. "If it had been just a smidge farther away from its star it would have had the same temperature as the Earth."
... The group, which includes astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor, who discovered the very first extrasolar planet in 1995, found the new exoplanet after scanning 2,000 very small sunlike stars with an automated bank of eight small telescopes no larger than the ones advanced amateurs use. The telescopes are mounted together as a system they call Mearth (pronounced mirth) at an observatory on Mount Lemmon in Arizona, ...]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Kepler has been named the 2010 Best of What's New grand prize winner in the aviation/space category by Popular Science magazine.]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Kepler experienced a safe mode event on November 18. A safe mode is a self-protective measure that the spacecraft takes when something unexpected occurs. During safe mode, the spacecraft points the solar panels directly at the sun and begins to slowly rotate about a sun-aligned axis.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
Kepler experienced a safe mode event on November 18. A safe mode is a self-protective measure that the spacecraft takes when something unexpected occurs. During safe mode, the spacecraft points the solar panels directly at the sun and begins to slowly rotate about a sun-aligned axis. The spacecraft automatically powered off the photometer and one redundant subsystem as a safety precaution. Engineers immediately began telemetry analysis to determine spacecraft subsystem health, and root cause determination of what triggered the safe mode. This safe mode occurred when the team was preparing to download another month of scientific data from Kepler. The scientific data was not in danger and was downloaded successfully via the NASA Deep Space Network on November 19. Engineers verified nominal performance of all of Kepler s systems and successfully recovered the vehicle from safe mode. Science data collection was resumed by the evening of November 20.]]> Category: Kepler in the News
Popular Mechanics. Excerpt: ...As president of his Delavan, Wis., high school science club in the 1950s, William Borucki helped build a device a magnetometer coupled with ultraviolet and infrared transmitters to contact UFOs. The technology was sound, but the test subjects never showed up. However, Borucki, now a space scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, didn't abandon his preoccupation with aliens. For two decades, he has argued that by taking pictures of planets as they pass in front of their home stars, scientists could identify likely sites for life in other solar systems. ...He and his colleagues persevered in the face of enduring skepticism from NASA managers. Borucki and Doug Caldwell of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute proved they could capture the images with charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, like the ones used in digital cameras. SETI's Jon Jenkins wrote algorithms to distinguish small planets from the "noise" of deep space. Fellow Ames scientist David Koch banged together a miniature steel-and-Styrofoam demonstrator with the help of machine shops in the Bay Area. "By 2000, we had done all the things they asked," says the soft-spoken Borucki, now 70 years old. With the launch of an instrument-laden rocket last March, the mission, dubbed Kepler, became reality. Award - ASTRONOMY: PLANET-SEEKING SPACE TELESCOPE INNOVATORS: Eric Bachtell (Ball Aerospace), William Borucki, David Koch (NASA), Doug Caldwell, Jon Jenkins (SETI Institute), David Latham (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) BRILLIANT IDEA: A multiyear survey of 100,000 stars, in search of planets where alien life may thrive.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
By Debra Werner, Space News. Excerpt: MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. ... In spite of electronic components that are creating extraneous noise on board the Kepler space telescope, NASA officials are confident the mission will be able by 2011 to either detect Earth-size planets or reveal that those planets are uncommon, said James Fanson, Kepler project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. During an Oct. 29 meeting here, William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at the NASA Ames Research Center, told members of the NASA Advisory Council that noise produced by three of the 42 amplifiers used to boost signals from the telescope s charge-coupled devices was creating image artifacts, or features present in the Kepler data sets that reflect noise rather than an accurate picture of the stars. "Those image artifacts are slowing our data analysis," Borucki told the panel. "Mitigation work to flag and correct those problems will be complete in 2011." That does not mean, however, that Kepler will be unable to discover Earth-size planets before 2011, Fanson told Space News Nov. 5. Data obtained last summer ... indicated that the instrument is sensitive enough to detect far smaller objects, including planets the size of Earth. …"Kepler measurements are at least 100 times more sensitive than measurements obtained from telescopes on Earth," he said. The quality of the light curve is so extraordinary, in fact, that one mission official wept with joy when he saw the data, Fanson added….]]> Category: Mission Manager Updates
Kepler completed another science data download over October 18-19. In this download, a month’s worth of science data was transmitted through the NASA Deep Space Network and into the Science Operations Center at Ames Research Center.]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
NASA'S Kepler Mission Spies Changing Phases in a Distant World]]> Category: NASA Kepler News
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a media briefing on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 2 p.m. EDT, to discuss early science results of the Kepler mission. Kepler is the first spacecraft with the ability to find Earth-size planets orbiting stars like our sun in a zone where liquid water could exist.]]> Category: News About Planet-finding
Jonathan I. Lunine, Bruce Macintosh, and Stanton Peale, Physics Today, page 46. Excerpt: The variety of methods by which planets beyond our solar system can be found will lead to the detection and eventual characterization of Earth-size bodies orbiting their stars at hospitable distances. ...Since 1995, more than 340 planets around stars other than the Sun have been discovered. After centuries of speculation as to whether our planetary system might be one of many, that’s a remarkable achievement. The techniques that have been used to accomplish those discoveries and to study the properties of the exoplanets are based on physical phenomena ranging from the straightforwardly simple—planets tugging gravitationally at their host stars or blocking their light—to the subtle general-relativistic effect of gravitational microlensing. But conceptual simplicity doesn’t make it any less difficult to detect the tiny periodic effect of an orbiting planet on its host’s motion or apparent brightness....]]>