(PLANETQUEST) -- For Kepler, the final countdown has begun.
NASA's first mission specifically designed to look for Earth-size planets orbiting other stars is on track for a launch in February 2009, said Kepler Deputy Project Manager Jim Fanson.
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Artist's visualization of the Kepler spacecraft. Kepler will trail Earth as it orbits the sun, in order to avoid radiation and interference from the Earth and moon. |
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"This final year, we're focused on assembling and testing - it's an exciting time," Fanson said. "It's an intense challenge, because if you discover a problem, you don't have a lot of time to take things apart. Seeing the physical equipment of the mission come together makes for a very rewarding experience," Fanson said. "We just finished assembling the telescope and saw our first test images, what we call
first light."
Kepler will target stars looking for planets that "transit," or cross the discs of their host stars as seen from Earth. By measuring the light of the star dip slightly as a planet passes in front of it, scientists will be able to determine the size of a planet and from the period of the sequence of dips and using Kepler's third law the planet's orbit.
Kepler is designed to look for very small planets like Earth - planets that are impossible to see with ground-based telescopes. Kepler will continuously monitor a large swatch of sky, about as big as two "scoops" of the Big Dipper. It does this by using a 1.4-meter wide mirror that reflects light into a mosaic of CCDs containing 96 mega-pixels - the same kind of light-collecting device found in digital cameras. By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope can only monitor a small part of the sky at once - about as much as a grain of sand held at arm's length.
Throughout the course of the mission, scientists plan to look at about 100,000 stars with Kepler. And depending on how many are out there, Kepler could find dozens of rocky planets like ours orbiting close enough to their stars to support life - a region called the "habitable zone."
Fanson said the challenges of getting Kepler ready for space, combined with the anticipation of what the mission will discover, should make for an exhilarating year. "It's gratifying personally to be part of this team," Fanson said. "This is a unique opportunity for us to answer a question humans have been asking for thousands of years."
Written by Joshua Rodriguez/PlanetQuest
