SlyCoopersButt
New member
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2008
- Messages
- 425
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 0
About coming to that day! They have concluded a review to evaluate similarities between the Delta II and Taurus fairing systems and Kepler is currently green for launch March 6th 10:49 p.m. EST from Cape Canaveral's pad 17B. The mission is now just a little over 3 days from scheduled launch.
Kepler is NASA's first mission designed for seeking out Earth size and smaller planets. Quite excited to see this mission about to launch! This one has me more excited than usual when it comes to what we may learn! Good luck to the team and go Kepler!
(qoutes)
The Transit Method of Detecting Extrasolar Planets:
When a planet passes in front of a star as viewed from Earth, the event is called a “transit”. On Earth, we can observe an occasional Venus or Mercury transit. These events are seen as a small black dot creeping across the Sun—Venus or Mercury blocks sunlight as the planet moves between the Sun and us. Kepler finds planets by looking for tiny dips in the brightness of a star when a planet crosses in front of it—we say the planet transits the star.
Once detected, the planet's orbital size can be calculated from the period (how long it takes the planet to orbit once around the star) and the mass of the star using Kepler's Third Law of planetary motion. The size of the planet is found from the depth of the transit (how much the brightness of the star drops) and the size of the star. From the orbital size and the temperature of the star, the planet's characteristic temperature can be calculated. From this the question of whether or not the planet is habitable (not necessarily inhabited) can be answered
Kepler instrument:
The Kepler instrument is a specially designed 0.95-meter diameter telescope called a photometer or light meter. It has a very large field of view for an astronomical telescope — 105 square degrees, which is comparable to the area of your hand held at arm's length. It needs that large a field in order to observe the necessary large number of stars. It stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission—3.5 or more years.
The photometer must be spacebased to obtain the photometric precision needed to reliably see an Earth-like transit and to avoid interruptions caused by day-night cycles, seasonal cycles and atmospheric perturbations, such as, extinction associated with ground-based observing.
Kepler Scientific Objectives:
The scientific objective of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems. This is achieved by surveying a large sample of stars to:
Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets that are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars
Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets
Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems
Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets
Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques
Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.
Target Field of View:
Since transits only last a fraction of a day, all the stars must be monitored continuously, that is, their brightnesses must be measured at least once every few hours. The ability to continuously view the stars being monitored dictates that the field of view (FOV) must never be blocked at any time during the year. Therefore, to avoid the Sun the FOV must be out of the ecliptic plane. The secondary requirement is that the FOV have the largest possible number of stars. This leads to the selection of a region in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations of our Galaxy as shown.
(Qoutes, Courtesy nasa)
Image of Kepler's targeted star field (Courtesy nasa)
For detailed info on Kepler visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html
PDF mission fact sheet: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/284769main_FS-Gen_1208_print.pdf
United Launch Alliance http://www.ulalaunch.com/index.html
For detailed up to date news visit: http://spaceflightnow.com/
Kepler is NASA's first mission designed for seeking out Earth size and smaller planets. Quite excited to see this mission about to launch! This one has me more excited than usual when it comes to what we may learn! Good luck to the team and go Kepler!
(qoutes)
The Transit Method of Detecting Extrasolar Planets:
When a planet passes in front of a star as viewed from Earth, the event is called a “transit”. On Earth, we can observe an occasional Venus or Mercury transit. These events are seen as a small black dot creeping across the Sun—Venus or Mercury blocks sunlight as the planet moves between the Sun and us. Kepler finds planets by looking for tiny dips in the brightness of a star when a planet crosses in front of it—we say the planet transits the star.
Once detected, the planet's orbital size can be calculated from the period (how long it takes the planet to orbit once around the star) and the mass of the star using Kepler's Third Law of planetary motion. The size of the planet is found from the depth of the transit (how much the brightness of the star drops) and the size of the star. From the orbital size and the temperature of the star, the planet's characteristic temperature can be calculated. From this the question of whether or not the planet is habitable (not necessarily inhabited) can be answered
Kepler instrument:
The Kepler instrument is a specially designed 0.95-meter diameter telescope called a photometer or light meter. It has a very large field of view for an astronomical telescope — 105 square degrees, which is comparable to the area of your hand held at arm's length. It needs that large a field in order to observe the necessary large number of stars. It stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission—3.5 or more years.
The photometer must be spacebased to obtain the photometric precision needed to reliably see an Earth-like transit and to avoid interruptions caused by day-night cycles, seasonal cycles and atmospheric perturbations, such as, extinction associated with ground-based observing.
Kepler Scientific Objectives:
The scientific objective of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems. This is achieved by surveying a large sample of stars to:
Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets that are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars
Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets
Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems
Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets
Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques
Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.
Target Field of View:
Since transits only last a fraction of a day, all the stars must be monitored continuously, that is, their brightnesses must be measured at least once every few hours. The ability to continuously view the stars being monitored dictates that the field of view (FOV) must never be blocked at any time during the year. Therefore, to avoid the Sun the FOV must be out of the ecliptic plane. The secondary requirement is that the FOV have the largest possible number of stars. This leads to the selection of a region in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations of our Galaxy as shown.
(Qoutes, Courtesy nasa)
Image of Kepler's targeted star field (Courtesy nasa)
For detailed info on Kepler visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html
PDF mission fact sheet: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/284769main_FS-Gen_1208_print.pdf
United Launch Alliance http://www.ulalaunch.com/index.html
For detailed up to date news visit: http://spaceflightnow.com/
Last edited:
Is there any flight profile graph? The instrument is going to take position in a Lagrange point, right?
