From the guys who brought you this fun video about JWST, here’s one telling you exactly why NASA rocks. As a European, I should add that ESA is also awesome! Here’s hoping a cute European geek (m/f) put its on video.
Kepler breaks new ground
August 8, 2009 By
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
Kepler sees the light
April 20, 2009 By
First light images from NASA’s Kepler space telescope were released last week following the satellite’s sucecssful launch on March 7. The picture shown here shows an (inversted) image of the starfield Kepler will be studying over the course of its exoplanet-finding mission, in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Galaxy. It may not look like much, but for the Kepler team it’s pretty special to see that their satellite is alive and well, and performing as it should. Congrats!
Go here for the full set of first light images.
Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Off she goes!
March 8, 2009 By
Kepler’s launch was a sucecss, yay! Watch a video of it below:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g44uA8kKwQ]
Countdown to Kepler
March 3, 2009 By
Astronomers’ eyes are on NASA this week as the agency aims to launch its mission for tracking down Earth-like exoplanets on Friday night (early Saturday morning if you’re in Europe). Over its three-year lifetime, Kepler will observe over 100,000 stars in a small part of the sky, over and over again to spot the tiny dips in brightness caused by a planet casting its shadow onto the star as it passes in front of it. Together with its European cousin CoRoT, which has been in orbit for a while already, Kepler is likely to increase our tally of known exoplanets by a factor of many. There’s been a ton of great media coverage about Kepler already so I’ll round up a few nice links here. And there’ll be much more to follow!
From NASA itself: the mission homepage, launch schedule. A live launch blog will appear here 2 hours before launch.
Follow Kepler on Twitter.
The New York Times have a great feature here.
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute gives his perspective on Discovery Space. Discovery Space have a little Kepler-themed area even, here.
A BBC story on British industrial involvement in Kepler.
[Update 04/03]
Director of Hubble news Ray Villard (Cosmic Ray) gives his perspective.
A news story in Nature.
Image credit: Ball Aerospace
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