Kepler Mission |
Kepler Mission |
Sep 24 2005, 04:23 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 147 Joined: 3-July 04 From: Chicago, IL Member No.: 91 |
This NASA Discovery mission is to be launched in June 2008 and will search for Earth-size and smaller planets. Launch was originally scheduled in 2007 but delayed by 8 months due to "funding constraints".
Here's the official web site: http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/ |
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Mar 8 2009, 08:00 PM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 131 Joined: 31-May 08 From: San Carlos, California, USA Member No.: 4168 |
I made it out to the Kepler launch party here at NASA Ames in Mountain View, CA. After the launch, masses of people starting filing out and I was able to grab a few minutes with Dr. Tom Roellig, co-investigator for Kepler. There were a few of us pelting him with questions, some of them interesting.
- "Flea on a headlight" whatever, what's the intensity resolution? Kepler has 16-bit A2Ds. - Kepler has an 90 megapixel digital camera. Is all that data beamed back to Earth? No, just the pixels that have a star sitting on them, about 5%. Then compression is about 2:1. - Does a star move from pixel to pixel during measurements? No. A star will sit within one pixel with a LARGE amount of the pixel to spare. - What if a star just happens to be right on the border of one pixel and another pixel? Kepler blurs adjacent pixels to account for this. (Not clear to me if this is accomplished in software or hardware.) - Why is Kepler's life span just six years? Not enough fuel. Have to desaturate from time to time, no choice. - (My question) Can we expect preliminary data to be published in May or June? Yes and no. The Kepler team will have some data and preliminary "subjects of interest" but they won't publish it. Because some media will misrepresent the data and you'll have headlines such as "30 Earths found!!!" and NASA will look bad for no reason when NASA has to clean up the mess. |
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