Sunday, March 15

Life on Other Planets?

It's good to hear NASA's Kepler spacecraft is safely on its way into its 6-year mission to study the heavens and find other Earth-like planets. The Delta II rocket carried Kepler aloft on March 6th with no problems. Kepler is expected to study between 100,000 and 170,000 sunlike stars in the Milky Way galaxy in the hopes of finding orbiting planets. To do this, Kepler will analyze shifts in each star's brightness.

According to NASA, the mission is as follows:

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:
  1. Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars;
  2. Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets;
  3. Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems;
  4. Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets;
  5. Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques; and
  6. Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.
This is quite a mission and it should be interesting to read about the results in the years to come.