Kepler launched in March 2009
The IAU General Assembly in Rio may well be the heart of the action in astronomy at the moment, but the rest of the world has not stopped either. Yesterday NASA announced the first results from its planet-hunting satellite Kepler, which was launched in March of this year. As I was holed up at the conference I wasn’t able to follow the news conference, but I gather the results are really excellent and very exciting already at this early stage of the mission. The bottom line: based on first data, Kepler is performing extremely well and is capable of detecting Earth-like exoplanets. This is a major achievement for all scientists and engineers involved, who I am sure will be delighted with these data.
Professor Astronomy in Texas has a full overview of the results presented by NASA, and plenty of expertise to put it all into context. Follow the jump for the full lowdown!
Image: NASA/K. Shiflett
Any idea if the field of view for Kepler was deliberately set so there’d be at least one planet to find? It seems like it would have been a good plan for checkout.
Based on the multitude of planets that have been discovered in recent years through all available methods, I think any large-enough target region with stars in the wider solar neighbourhood of the type that we know are likely to host planetary systems (dwarf stars, mainly), was bound to throw up many discoveries. Further criteria deal with the observing efficiency, e.g. if the region lies to close in the plane of our solar system, the target stars would get obscured by the Sun periodically, or we’d get asteroids passing through the field of view.You can read more about Kepler’s field of view and how it was selected here.