Saturday, March 07, 2009
Nasa launches Earth hunter probe
BBC - 7 March 2009
An unmanned Nasa mission to search the sky for Earth-like planets with the potential to host life has launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The Kepler telescope will orbit the Sun to watch a patch of space thought to contain about 100,000 stars like ours.
It will look for the slight dimming of light from these "suns" as planets pass between them and the spacecraft.
[...]
Equipped with the largest camera ever launched into space, it is the first mission designed to find rocky worlds orbiting Sun-like stars. Planets located in a warm zone - known as the habitable zone - might host liquid water on their surfaces.
And where there is liquid water, scientists argue, there is at least the potential for life.
[...]
Finding Earth-size planets is one thing, confirming life - even simple microbial life - exists on them is another matter altogether; and will require future telescopes capable of seeing trace gasses in the planets' atmospheres that are a possible signature for biology.
Full article (and video of launch)
Kepler Mission @ wiki
Yay, no failure so far. Me like telescopes. I want more, bigger and faster please! I want to see a picture of an extrasolar planet, Google Earth resolution, before I die.
ReplyDeleteHere is a picture of the Kepler telescope and one of the main mirror here.
ESA will launch two space telescopes this year, Planck (cosmic microwave background radiation, testing big bang models, determine rate of expansion of the universe) and Herschel (formation of galaxies and stars, chemical composition of solar system and universe).
ESA also has plans for a mission called Darwin, a swarm of 3 telescopes (3-4m mirror) that redirect the light to a central spacecraft. They will use interference (interferometry) to remove stars from pictures and be able to see the planets orbiting the star. It is a very difficult mission, but a swarm of telescopes and interferometry are very promising in the search for extrasolar planets and life. The swarm of smaller telescopes function like a single mirror of very large size (>100m) and being able to remove the direct star light is very useful as well, as anyone who has ever looked into the Sun can imagine.
Darwin observes in the infrared to determine chemical composition of atmospheres, in search for life.
Yes, if they can adjust and tweak those swarm telescopes they can be very effective. But even though they have the resolution of a 100m telescope, they don't have anywhere near the light gathering capacity, so they will need to look a long time at there target to capture enough light for an image.
ReplyDeleteI want a giant moon based telescope filling a whole crater. A few 100m and we would get a good look at the surface of extra-solar planets.
We should stuff a telescope in every moon crater.
ReplyDelete