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Planetary News: Kepler (2009)

First Light for Kepler

Send this story to a friend or share it at: Slashdot - Digg this - Reddit - Del.icio.us - Newsvine - NowPublic Click to enlarge > Kepler Credit: NASA / ARC

NASA's Kepler mission has taken its first images of the gigantic star-field that will be in its sights for the next three years. This 100-square-degree patch of sky, equivalent to two side-by-side dips of the big dipper, contains an estimated 14 million different stars. Of these, 100,000 carefully selected stars will be Kepler's special focus, where it will search for orbiting exoplanets. If predictions hold true, Kepler will for the first time be able to detect small rocky planets like the Earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of their stars.

Launched on March 6, 2009, Kepler is designed to search for minute but regular shifts in a star's brightness, indicating that it is transited by an orbiting planet. To accomplish this, Kepler carries with it a 95 megapixel camera, the largest ever launched into space. This ultra-sensitive instrument not only observes an enormous number of stars continuously for years, but it does so with unparalleled sensitivity, measuring changes in brightness of only 20 parts per million.

On April 8, for the first time, Kepler's camera turned its sites on its designated patch of sky, and took its very first image. To Lia Lapiana, Kepler's program executive at NASA Headquarters, the result was awe-inspiring. "To be able to see millions of stars in a single snapshot is simply breathtaking" she said.

Kepler then snapped two additional images, each of an area only one thousandth of its full field of view. One includes a star cluster designated NGC 6791, located 13,000 lightyears from Earth; the other contains a star known as TrES-2, known to be home to a Jupiter-like planet that completes each orbit by every 2.5 days.

Over the next few weeks Kepler will continue taking images in order to calibrate its camera and test its ability to detect known exoplanets. Once the trial period is completed, Kepler will fix its sites permanently on its star-field and begin the most sensitive exoplanet search ever.

Click to enlarge > First Light for Kepler Taken on April 8, 2009, these are the first images taken by the planet-hunting mission Kepler. The large image in the center shows a 100 degree square patch of sky containing an estimated 14 million stars. Kepler will observe this region continuously for more than 3 years, searching for signs of transiting planets in a group 100,000 pre-selected stars. The dark lines crisscrossing the image indicate the arrangement of the charged coupled devices (CCD's) in Kepler's powerful camera). The top left image is of a region 1000 times smaller than the full field, which contains the known transiting planet TrES-2. The image on the top right includes star cluster NGC 6791, at a distance of 13,000 lightyears from Earth. Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Kepler's photometric survey is ideally suited for detecting a large number of exoplanets in a relatively short amount of time. By observing 100,000 planets simultaneously, it is almost certain to come across dozens, if not hundreds of planets that pass directly in front of their star, dimming its light for the duration of the transit. "We expect to find hundreds of planets" said William Borucki, Kepler's science principal investigator at NASA Ames.

In fact, Kepler can do much more than simply locate faraway planets. Since the degree to which a star dims is directly proportional to the size of the transiting planet, Kepler's photometry can also provide a good estimate of the exoplanets' diameter, detecting planets as small as the Earth. "Everything about Kepler has been optimized to find Earth-size planets" said James Fanson, Kepler's project manager at JPL in Pasadena. "Our images are road maps that will allow us, in a few years, to point to a star and say a world like ours is there."

You Can Play a Key Role in the Planet Hunt!

The search for life among the stars will be dramatically advanced if we can identify planets that—based on size, density, and distance from their suns—are similar to our Earth and could possess the elements for life.

Make a donation to our FINDS Exo-Earth project and YOU can help build the technology to make this possible!

But while photometry can determine exoplanets size, it cannot determine their mass, so essential for understanding the true nature of these distant worlds. To collect this crucial bit of information scientists must rely on a different method, known as "radial velocity," which measures the slight but regular shifts in a star's spectrum as it rocks to the tug of an orbiting planet. Ideally, radial velocity measurements would follow up Kepler's photometry, combining the advantages of each method and providing a far more complete picture of the planet. Unfortunately the radial velocity method cannot currently keep up with the remarkable sensitivity of Kepler's detections. Whereas Kepler is expected to detect planets as small as the Earth, Radial velocity can only detect planets several times larger, about the mass of Neptune. If Kepler detects what appears to be an Earth-like planet, radial velocity measurements can do nothing to follow it up.

All this however may soon change. With sponsorship from The Planetary Society, leading planet hunters Geoff Marcy of U.C. Berkeley and Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University are developing a cutting-edge optical system that will dramatically improve the sensitivity of radial velocity measurements. The system, known as FINDS Exo-Earths (Fiber-optic Improved Next generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths) will first be tested on the 3 meter telescope at the Lick Observatory in California. If it proves successful it will be installed on the giant Keck Telescope in Hawaii, where it will be able to detect and measure the mass of Earth-size planets.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for The Planetary Society and our members to take part in the search for distant worlds, and eventually distant Earths " said Bruce Betts, The Planetary Society's Director of Projects. With Kepler's data and follow-ups by FINDS Exo-Earths we may soon be able to detect other world like our own -- small rocky planets orbiting in the habitable zone around their stars."