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27 Dec 2006. Soyuz 2-1B launches with COROT. By Chris Bergin. [NASAspaceflight.com] Excerpt: ... The ESA (European Space Agency) space telescope COROT has launched on Wednesday...from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 2:24pm UK time...The COROT project, started in 1994, is classed as high-precision stellar photometry mission, with two scientific goals: to probe the inner structure of the stars and to search for extrasolar telluric planets. ...it is equipped with a 27-cm diameter afocal telescope and a 4-CCD camera. The spacecraft is expected to greatly enlarge the number of known exoplanets during its two-year mission and provide the first detection of rocky planets, perhaps just a few times the mass of the Earth. 'COROT could detect so many planets of this new type, together with plenty of the old type that astronomers will be able to make statistical studies of them,' claimed Malcolm Fridlund, ESA's Project Scientist for COROT. COROT will be the first extrasolar planet search mission capable of seeing the smaller, rocky worlds; although they will have to be in close orbits around their stars. However, it will be soon followed by NASA's Kepler mission, a space telescope with a 0.95 metre mirror. Kepler works the same way as COROT, looking for planetary transits, and is expected to find the first Earth-sized planets in similar orbits to our world.... The Polar orbit [of COROT] will allow for continuous observation of two large regions in opposite directions of the sky for more than 150 days each. Within each region there are many selected star fields that will be monitored in turn. The first target field is towards Orion, then the spacecraft will turn towards the centre of our Galaxy, the Milky Way.
Further reports on COROT launch with mentions of Kepler:
14 November 2006. COROT and the new chapter of planetary searches. European Space Agency. Excerpt: The launch of COROT [COnvection, ROtation, & Planetarium Transits] on 21 December 2006 is a long awaited event in the quest to find planets beyond our Solar System. Searching from above the Earth's atmosphere, COROT – the CNES project with ESA participation - will be the first space mission specifically dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets. COROT is expected to greatly enlarge the number of known exoplanets during its two-year mission and provide the first detection of rocky planets, perhaps just a few times the mass of the Earth. "COROT could detect so many planets of this new type, together with plenty of the old type that astronomers will be able to make statistical studies of them," says Malcolm Fridlund, ESA's Project Scientist for COROT. ...COROT will be the first extrasolar planet search mission capable of seeing the smaller, rocky worlds; although they will have to be in close orbits around their stars. COROT also opens the way for the future. Two years later, in October 2008, NASA will launch Kepler, a space telescope with a 0.95 metre mirror. Kepler works the same way as COROT, looking for planetary transits, and is expected to find the first Earth-sized planets in similar orbits to our world....
Also at MSNBC.
18 Oct 2006. Scientists discover 16 possible planets. By Diana Whitaker, DAILY BRUIN (UCLA) Peering more than 26,000 light years away, UCLA and NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered 16 new planet candidates, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy. ..."We monitored stars near the galactic center continuously for seven days," said team leader Dr. Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore. ...To confirm that the dimming was caused by an object orbiting a star rather than something simply passing by it, the team used Hubble to detect between two and 15 consecutive transits ...NASA's future Kepler Mission will continuously monitor about 100,000 stars in the Milky Way for four or five years to detect transiting planets, Sahu said. Kepler will be sensitive enough to detect possibly hundreds of Earth-size planet candidates in or near the habitable zone, the distance from a star where liquid water could feasibly exist on a planet's surface, NASA said.
10 October 2006. ASKED AND ANSWERED. Detroit Free Press. Excerpt:
QUESTION: Does NASA have any new planet-hunting spacecraft in the works?
ANSWER: Yes. One is scheduled for launch in 2008. It is named after Johannes Kepler, the late 16th-Century German astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion. The planet-seeking spacecraft is under construction by the Ball Aerospace Corp. in Boulder, Colo. The project is overseen by scientists and engineers at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where the space agency's Astrobiology Institute has its headquarters and the independent SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Institute is nearby.
8 October2006. In search of life/Planet hunters scan heavens for warm, Earthlike worlds. David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle Science Editor. "Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice in Wonderland. "Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!" In something like a celestial land rush that began only 10 years ago, more than 50 teams of astronomers around the world are aiming their telescopes from mountaintops and aboard an orbiting spacecraft to scan the Milky Way in a race to detect more planets circling far-off stars. ... NASA now has one new planet-hunting spacecraft scheduled for launch in [November] 2008 ... under construction by the Ball Aerospace Corp. in Boulder, Colo. It is overseen by scientists and engineers at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where the space agency's Astrobiology Institute has its headquarters and the independent SETI Institute is nearby. The spacecraft is named after Johannes Kepler, the 17th century German astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion.... from its flight path trailing Earth's orbit around the sun, the spacecraft's telescope will scan at least 100,000 stars in the region of the constellation Cygnus the Swan during its four-year mission. Its extraordinarily sensitive telescope is designed to detect planets at least the size of Earth by measuring the almost-imperceptible dimming of the star's light whenever a planet's orbit carries it directly across its parent sun's face. "Earth-size planets will be really hard to spot," says Janice Voss, a former astronaut and veteran of five space shuttle missions, who is director of the Kepler science office at Ames. "But by watching each planet as it transits its star at least three times, we should be able to determine that planet's orbit and its mass." ....
5 October 2006. Milky Way may hold Earth-like orbs. David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle Science Editor. Hubble telescope's recent finds suggest billions of planets. The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a trove of fast-moving "candidate" planets in a narrow region near the very center of the Milky Way, and astronomers say there must be billions more of them -- including many like Earth that orbit their suns in so-called "habitable" zones. ...16 objects about the size of Jupiter circling stars, scientists announced Wednesday. ...The Hubble mission was not designed to detect any such planets. ... "There's now a high probability that Earths will be relatively common in the galaxy," said Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington who was not on the Hubble team. "We're really getting the feeling that there will be habitable planets among them -- but not necessarily inhabited." Boss is on the science team now readying a NASA spacecraft named Kepler that is scheduled for launch in 2008 and is designed to detect hundreds of Earth-size planets in our own region of the Milky Way. Some of those planets, Boss and his colleagues reason, might well lie in or near the habitable zones of their solar systems.
13 September 2006. Modified Backyard Telescopes Find Extrasolar Planet. By Ker Than, space.com. Excerpt: A planet slightly larger than Jupiter was recently spotted as it passed in front of a Sun-like star 500-light-years away. Called TrES-2, the new extrasolar planet is the second to be discovered using telescopes built from off-the-shelf components similar to those used by amateur stargazers.
It is also the first to be spotted in a swath of sky NASA has targeted for a future mission that will specifically look for Earth-like worlds. ..."Kepler will find lots of objects like TrES-2 in its quest to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars," said Edward Dunham, another Lowell Observatory scientist involved in the discovery. "I imagine that TrES-2 will be one of Kepler's first targets, and will be an old friend by the end of the mission" ....
9 September 2006. Draconian Planet. Our home solar system may be down by a planet with the recent demotion of Pluto, but the number of giant planets discovered in orbit around other stars continues to grow steadily. Now, an international team of astronomers has detected a planet slightly larger than Jupiter that orbits a star 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. ...The planet TrES-2 is also noteworthy for being the first transiting planet in an area of the sky known as the "Kepler field," which has been singled out as the targeted field of view for the upcoming NASA Kepler mission. Using a satellite-based telescope, Kepler will stare at this patch of sky for four years, and should discover hundreds of giant planets and Earth-like planets. Finding a planet in the Kepler field with the current method allows astronomers to plan future observations with Kepler that include searching for moons around TrES-2.
8 Sept 2006. Distant, Jupiter-Sized Planet Detected, Irene Klotz, Discovery News. Excerpt: Astronomers using a tiny amateur-class telescope and off-the-shelf camera lenses have found a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a star 500 light-years from Earth. The planet, called TRES-2, is the first to be found in this particular field of view, known as the Kepler Field. And the discovery is the second for a network called the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, or TrES, which taps small telescopes in California, Arizona and the Canary Islands to hunt for planets outside of our solar system....
Jun 2, 2006. Missions to search for other worlds in jeopardy. BY ALAN HALE FOR THE ALMAGORDO DAILY NEWS. Excerpt: ... some planned space missions can come to a premature end because of budgetary reasons, ...the Dawn mission, ... was recently canceled and then reinstated.
...Within the past few years several additional planets have been found via the "transit" technique, i.e., by a slight drop in the parent star's brightness as the planet passes between us and the star, and blocks out a small portion of the star's light. ...It is also the best currently available technique for detecting Earth-like planets, which would be expected to orbit close to their respective apparent stars and thus be in a position more amenable for such transits.
Such is the rationale behind the Kepler mission.... Kepler's primary mission will be to keep a continuous watch on approximately 100,000 stars in an area of sky near the "neck" of Cygnus, the swan.... Of these stars, a certain percentage would be expected to have planets in the right orbital configuration so as to produce transits, and Kepler is being designed to detect the accompanying regular drops in brightness that indicates their existence.
Kepler was approved as a NASA mission in 2001, and had originally been slated for launch next year. Some budgetary and other issues have delayed its launch, but things are now on track for a scheduled launch in October 2008. Kepler's planned mission is to last for four years, and once the data is analyzed we should have a reasonably good handle on what percentage of stars possess planets like Earth.
...SIM PlanetQuest had originally been planned for launch in 2009, with the TPF interferometer being launched around 2014 and the coronagraph around 2020. ...SIM PlanetQuest is being delayed until at least 2013 and perhaps 2015, while TPF is being "deferred indefinitely" -- a somewhat equivocal way of saying that it is being canceled.
30 March 2006. Astrobiology at ten. A young discipline holds promise yet. NATURE|Vol 440. Editorial… Setting aside for now the difficulties of allocating a constrained NASA science budget, the fundamental scepticism voiced by some of astrobiology’s critics is misplaced, for at least two reasons. The first is the timescale of space science. Ten years is no time at all in terms of mission planning — and as a result there has not yet been a single astrobiological space mission. The first two that might make it off the launch pad will get under way in the next couple of years: the Kepler mission, which will look for planets the size of Earth circling other stars in orbits that might allow liquid water at the surface, and the Phoenix lander, which will look for organic molecules in ice on Mars. Both are important missions, Kepler profoundly so.
Feb 2006. Unveiling Distant Worlds. By Sara Seager. Sky & Telescope magazine, p. 28. Excerpt: By 1999 astronomers had firmly established the existence of nearly 30 extrasolar planets. But we knew virtually nothing about them other than their minimum masses and their orbits. To answer even the simplest questions about their physical properties, we needed to discover a transiting planet — one that passes in front of its parent star every orbit as seen from Earth. Based on the laws of probability and the growing number of exoplanets, we knew that a transiting body would be discovered at any time. I was so certain that after a month-long vacation away from phones, newspapers, and e-mail, the first question I asked the outside world was, “Have astronomers discovered a transiting exoplanet?” Now we have a whole zoo of more than 160 exoplanets, and our desire to characterize them has intensified. Nearly 30 “hot Jupiters” such as 51 Pegasi b are known. Recent discoveries have expanded this class to include hot Neptune-mass bodies. [The article mentions Kepler and there is a sidebar on amateur contributions to transit observations by Greg Laughlin that focuses on Ron Bissinger and mentions Tim Castellano of TransitSearch.com. There is a light curve in the sidebar that represents Ron's observations. He is a member of the advisory board for Kepler EPO.]
19 January 2006. The Kepler Mission. by Jon Jenkins, Kepler Mission Analysis Lead and Co-Investigator for Signal Processing and Transit Detection, SETI Institute. Excerpt: Many of you may have observed the transit of Venus in 2004, and almost all of you saw images on the Internet and in the news of this rare and amazing event. The next transit of Venus won’t occur until June 6, 2012. After that, it will be another 115 years until the next one. If you missed it in 2004 and can’t wait until 2012 or 2117, cheer up: The next transit of an Earth-sized planet will likely be observed in 2007 by the NASA Discovery Program’s Kepler Mission. This planet won’t be a member of our solar system – it will be an extrasolar planet.... Full article is also at space.com in article called Close-Up on the Kepler Mission.
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