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Kepler Mission
Hungry4info
post Aug 25 2010, 02:49 AM
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QUOTE (Stu @ Aug 24 2010, 05:17 PM) *
a tiny ball, just a couple of dozen pixels wide, but it's blue, and white...


Mmmm water cloud Jovians...


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Norm Hartnett
post Aug 25 2010, 06:01 AM
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- Matthew Holman, associate director, Theoretical Astrophysics Division, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
- Alycia Weinberger, astronomer, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington

Hum, what does the inclusion of these two tell us, if anything?

- Edit -

Both have published in circumstellar debris disks...
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Drkskywxlt
post Aug 25 2010, 01:05 PM
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QUOTE (SFJCody @ Aug 24 2010, 08:02 PM) *
That would require something a bit more advanced than TPF.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/...anetImager.html


I recall that some versions of TPF or TPF-like exoplanet missions would be able to produce "images" a few pixels wide. Even that would possibly be able to determine the rough locations of continents, time the planet's rotation, and maybe even detect sun-glint off its oceans. On the sun-glint, an article was just posted on Arxiv yesterday saying that JWST would be able to detect sunglint on exoplanet oceans IF it had an external occulter flying nearby. http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/1008.3864
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Greg Hullender
post Aug 25 2010, 02:43 PM
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As long as we're taking bets, I'm thinking it's just about time for them to announce the first "hot Earth". Something Earth-sized or smaller with dozens or even hundreds of transits.

As for the extended mission, it does seem Kepler suffers from the law of diminishing returns in two ways. First, as already mentioned, planets in longer orbits are much less likely to transit at all. Second, as far as reducing the uncertainty of its other results, that only goes down with the square root of the number of observations. So the difference between ten years vs. four years only knocks about 35% off your error bars. On the other hand, maybe they might find indirect evidence for other planets, so that'd be an argument for sticking with the same spot.

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Stu
post Aug 25 2010, 02:50 PM
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QUOTE (SFJCody @ Aug 25 2010, 01:02 AM) *
That would require something a bit more advanced than TPF.


Of course, it would. I was following Nick's train of thought that Kepler success might lead to follow on missions that were more advanced than originally envisaged. So I believe that a post-Kepler TPF would be a lot more powerful than the TPF originally proposed.


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sawyer
post Aug 26 2010, 12:00 AM
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There was a follow on mission to the tpf loosely specified that I believe had a 5x5 pixel rendition. It was called the Planet Imager and was an array of TPF's in a formation.
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hendric
post Aug 26 2010, 05:54 AM
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nprev,
Everyone else already said it, but to reiterate: Once we've got 3 transits, minimum, of anything with <2yr orbit, I think it's time to move on to a new FOV. Remember, that doesn't mean Kepler won't have found anything with a 5 year orbit, but that most objects of (likely transit)*(interest to us) would have been found. Moving on to a different view would tell us more about solar system formation and how it depends on variables like star metallicity.

Besides, I don't see Kepler as finding every planet, but rather finding interesting planets worth spending time and $$$ on following up. An exo-Mars or Neptune orbiting in a 5 year orbit isn't likely to warrant followup.

Basically, I think we get better statistics on things like "how many earth analogs to expect per 100 cubic parsecs at Sun's distance from the galactic core" when we widen the net vs trolling (hah, that must be the first time in the history of the internets that word is actually used as originally defined) the same area.

Edit: Also, I don't think the Kepler stars are necessarily great prospects for a TPF followup anyways, since they are intentionally fairly far away, to keep them from being too bright in the Kepler CCDs.

What Kepler can really tell us is stuff like "Expect 1.3 semi-Earths for every 100 G stars you look at with metallicty X, 2.6 sE for every 100 K at with metallicity Y, etc." Basically, a 3D graph with star mass on the X axis, star metallicity on the Y axis, and sE probability on the Z. This could then direct a TPF "planet hunt" targeting the nearest stars most likely to host Earth-like planets.

Really, what I would do after the nominal mission is look at new FOVs every 2 years, to maximize that data set. And then look into solar sailing to keep going once the tanks are empty. smile.gif


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Hungry4info
post Aug 26 2010, 10:34 AM
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If this were CoRoT, I'd agree.

But finding the most planets is not the objective of Kepler. Kepler is trying to make a census of planets at a range of orbital periods. The range of these orbital periods probed will depend on how long it stares at the same area of the sky. The Kepler candidates are not going to be very accessible to anything other than noisy radial velocity to constrain their mass. That's it. There is little to be gained by switching fields of view... certainly not enough to make up for the loss of probing the planet population at greater distances for the star.


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sawyer
post Aug 26 2010, 10:36 AM
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hendric,

Absolutely correct. Direct planet imaging will be concentrated on the closest planetary systems. The 5x5 pixel view I alluded to with the "planet imager" applied to only very close in systems. I agree completely, Kepler is all about statistical characterization of stars and planetary systems. With that information, the design of follow on missions can then be done (much more) intelligently. I think we will want two+ missions for close in planetary systems. The first mission targeted to identify at least a handful of the closest earth sized planets in habitable zones. And the second (and other) missions targeted to muster the highest resolution multi-spectrum views of those worlds and parent star systems. I think in about 20-30 years we will finally see some images of alien "earths." Even before that we will get substantial information back on them through the ingeniuty of astrophysicists (e.g. statistical study of reflected light off of rotating and orbiting exo-planets).
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Decepticon
post Aug 26 2010, 03:12 PM
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I'm confused is this televised?
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ustrax
post Aug 26 2010, 03:24 PM
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QUOTE (Decepticon @ Aug 26 2010, 04:12 PM) *
I'm confused is this televised?


nope, if there are any additional questions regarding this release they will gladly be answered at Kepler's FB official page, drop by! smile.gif
http://www.facebook.com/NASAsKeplerMission?ref=ts


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Norm Hartnett
post Aug 26 2010, 03:29 PM
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QUOTE (Decepticon @ Aug 26 2010, 07:12 AM) *
I'm confused is this televised?


Not televised but you can listen to streaming audio at http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

"Link will appear..."
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Gsnorgathon
post Aug 26 2010, 04:48 PM
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FWIW, there's this bit from the Kepler web site:
The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.
Based on this, it would seem a new FOV would be more in keeping with the mission as described; but really I don't know enough to have an opinion either way.
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Norm Hartnett
post Aug 26 2010, 04:52 PM
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Link at http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html is now up.

Supporting documentation is available at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/m...ia_telecon.html

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AndyG
post Aug 26 2010, 05:04 PM
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And off it goes! smile.gif

Andy
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