October 20, 2005. Mother-Daughter Bond Strengthened by Science Festival. By Kat Teraji. Excerpt: ...Sally Ride, the first American woman to orbit the Earth 22 years ago, has joined forces with high-tech companies to put on Science Festivals all across the United States ... to encourage girls to take math and science classes .... Lisa Ready and her daughter Lea recently attended the Sally Ride Science Festival at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field. ...Lea’s favorite activity was a bottle rockets seminar, in which she enjoyed shooting plastic bottles into the air with different amounts of liquid in them. The kids loved Ride’s stories of space flight (especially the explanation of how the space toilet works), and the fact that she carried M&Ms to eat on the space shuttle. She introduced astronaut Janice Voss to the kids, science director for the Kepler spacecraft, and both scientists answered many questions from the kids. Lea will always remember times like this with her mom, and she will know that it was important to her mom to take this time out of her busy schedule and spend it doing something special with the daughter she loves so much.

2005-10-05. Sending Your Daughters To Space, by Erika Brown. [Forbes.com] NEW YORK - Twenty-two years after her first trip into space, astronaut Sally Ride is still breaking barriers. These days Ride, the first American woman to orbit the Earth, is teaming up with tech companies, like Intel, IBM and Google, to get young girls excited about studying math and science. ...At the recent Sally Ride Science Festival at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the Mars Society, the Kepler Mission and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy hosted booths where girls performed simple experiments, built paper models of spacecraft and saw themselves through an infrared camera. ...After Ride's speech, dozens of wide-eyed girls shot up their arms, bounced up and down and shouted questions at Ride, who was joined by Janice Voss, astronaut and science director for the Kepler spacecraft. "What do you eat in outer space?" (Ride likes M&M's.) "What was your favorite subject in school?" (Physics and astronomy.)

Oct 2005. One Big Ball of Rock. - Robert Naeye, Sky & Telescope. [hard copy article] Excerpt: Astronomers have found a large exoplanet with a remarkably high proportion of heavy elements… that challenges the assumption that all large planets are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. The object is 20 percent massive than Saturn, but one-half to two-thirds of it are elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It may have a core of rock and metal that contains up to 70 Earth masses. The planet orbits the 8.2-magnitude G0 star HD 149026 in Hercules, which lies about 260 light-years from Earth. …In 2004 team leader Debra A. Fischer… called attention to the star for its high content of heavy elements. Subsequent radial-velocity observations  …revealed wobbles due to a planet with a minimum mass of 115 Earths … in a 2.877-day orbit. Then on May 11, 2005, Gregory W Henry (Tennessee State University) detected a transit of the planet across the star's disk. … the planet's diameter is only 72 percent that of Jupiter. … its mean density: 1.4 times that of water. .…..Besides Henry's detection, California amateur astronomer Ron Bissinger observed partial transits of the planet on June 29th, July 2nd, and July 5th. "The data are of excellent quality," says discovery team member Gregory P. Laughlin (University of California, Santa Cruz), who has organized the Transitsearch.org network to help amateurs detect transiting exoplanets.
Bissinger's achievement is particularly impressive given that the new planet's transits cause a stellar dimming only a fifth as much as those caused by the other two transiting exoplanets detected by amateurs.  Figure Caption: California amateur astronomer Ron Bissinger recorded this light curve of HD 149026. … The light curve is a composite of photometry data acquired on the nights of June 29th, July 2nd, and July 5th. The red line is a theoretical model of the transit.

2005-07-14. Astronauts have faith in safety of shuttle flight. By ELISHA PAPPACODA, The Villages DAILY SUN. CAPE CANAVERAL - Even before NASA officials announced that the space shuttle Discovery would remain grounded until further notice, astronaut Janice Voss stressed that time is not of the essence when it comes to the STS-114 mission. "We're going to go when we're ready, whether that be today or tomorrow," Voss said Wednesday. "It just doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that we're ready." ...Voss, science director for the Kepler spacecraft and a veteran of five flights, already has experienced the delays that sometimes come with safe space travel....

6/14/2005 TriValley Tribune - Earth-like planet may not be out of this world - Scientists estimate of discovery about seven times the size of Earth. [Web-link gone] By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER, Inside Bay Area. Breaking a three-year secret, a team of astronomers said they have discovered the first Earth-sized and possibly Earth-like world in a miniature solar system nearby, just 15 light years away. The planet zings around a tiny red star every two days, close enough to roast the planet's surface to an uninhabitable 400-700 degrees, scientists announced Mon-day at the National Science Foundation. Even so, said National Aeronautics and Space Administration planetary theorist Jack Lissauer, "this is the most Earth-like world to have been discovered since the dawn of history." Led by a University of California duo, Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler, scientists worldwide have found 155 planets outside our solar system, chiefly by spotting a telltale wobble in starlight created as a planet tugs on its star.... Scientists estimate this newly discovered planet is only about seven times the size of the Earth. "For the first time we are beginning to find our planetary kin among the stars," said UC Berkeley's Marcy. ...It is so close to its star — one-10th of Earth's distance to the sun — that the new planet probably is mostly rock, like Earth. There, the resemblance ends. If the new world contains any water, it probably exists as hot vapor. Scientists suspect the planet is fairly flat and spins hardly at all, with "days" measured in decades. "It's a very unearthly world in many respects," said Lissauer, of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. ...But the explosion in discovery of new Earth-like worlds may have to wait three years for the launch of NASA's Kepler mission to put a planet-hunting observatory in space. Suspended between Earth and sun, the Kepler instruments will study more than 100,000 stars for Earth-sized planets that pass between their stars and the spacecraft. Odds are, said Lissauer, of NASA Ames Research Center, "We're going to see roughly 100 true Earth analogs." See also BBC article, Astrobiology magazine article, and Aljazeera article.

June 1, 2005. Theorist plots planet chase. by ROGER SNODGRASS, Monitor Assistant Editor. EXCERPT: Astronomers have yet to find the presence of an Earth-like planet, other than our own. But they have found planets orbiting stars, most of them gas-giants on the order of Jupiter or Saturn. And the pace of recent discoveries along with the progression of planet-finding tools and techniques seems to point toward finding a habitable planet within the next 10 years. ... "Stay tuned," said Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, as he laid out the ambitious program over the next two decades to find a host of new planetary objects circling sun-like stars in our local galactic neighborhood. ...Since the first extra-solar planet was found in 1995, more than 150 have now been registered. Most have been found by infrared spectrometry, which measures light from the star and its satellite with less contrast than in the visible spectrum. ...The plans now call for a combined assault of dedicated new ground telescopes along with a fleet of specialized spacecraft, like Kepler, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), the Terrestrial Planet Finder-Coronagraph (TPF-C), the Terrestrial Planet Finder-Interferometer (TPF-I), and Life Finder. Boss is a member of the science working group for one of the next leaps forward in finding planets, NASA's Kepler Mission which is now scheduled to lift off in 2008. "It stares at a 1000,000 stars in (the constellation) Cygnus and waits for them to blink," Boss said. "It sees which ones blink." The blink might be from a planet passing in front of it. "You wait a year and see if it blinks again," he said. "The fourth time it happens you're ready to go to press and tell everybody you've found an earth-like planet."

May 12, 2005. MAY 12, 2005. Young minds grill astrophysicist on space. ARVADA PRESS, p. 10. BY CHRIS DIMICK chrisd{at}milehighnews.com. Only one hour after landing at Denver International Airport from National Aeronautics and Space Administration offices in California, astrophysicist and NASA official David Koch was fielding a firing squad of questions. ...How did the stars and planets begin?," asked Savon Chea ...sitting among about 100 other fourth graders, who also had similar far-reaching and specific questions throughout Koch's presentation at Swanson Elementary School. Part of the Great Explorations in Math and Science program recently offered to fourth graders at the school, Koch's presentation on telescopes, stars and galaxies capped off an eight-week volunteer program focused on space science. The GEMS program was headed by fourth grade student teacher Helen Bachtell, and allowed students to once a week trade in their lunch/recess break to learn about space sciences. About 20 students took part in the program at Swanson, which was one of 36 schools in the country testing the curriculum for the Lawrence Hall of Science, based at the University of Callfornia at Berkeley. "It is cool to know about space because when people ask you about it, you know the answers," said participant Malachal McGuire, 10. "What is cool about space is I never thought it could be that big." To Full Article.

May 10, 2005. In the Stars: The message in the photons. By PHIL BERARDELLI. WASHINGTON, May 10 (UPI) -- Humanity is decades, perhaps even centuries, away from directly exploring even the nearest solar systems, but astronomers already are compiling incredibly detailed information from very distant objects. All they need are photons. ...Jaymie Matthews, with the University of British Columbia, described how the Canadian MOST satellite -- a briefcase-sized spacecraft tagged the "Humble Space Telescope" by its creators -- can detect exquisitely subtle shifts in stellar brightness that signify the transits of extrasolar planets. ...MOST ... follows a polar orbit, which permits it to fix on a single star continuously for up to two months, long enough to rule out stellar surface or interstellar phenomena. One of its targets is HD209458, a sun-like star about 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. HD209458 has a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting at the blinding speed of every 3.52 days, meaning it is extremely close to the solar surface. ...What is amazing is MOST's data show HD209458 has a small tidal bulge locked to the motion of HD209458 b, the close-orbiting planet. As b circles its parent, it gravitationally grabs a hunk of the star's midsection and yanks it along. ...Timothy M. Brown, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., also has been watching HD209458 but for a different purpose. He specializes in transit spectroscopy -- the study of the atmospheres of exoplanets that pass in front of their stars. ...Brown said observations of HD209458 b with existing instruments, including the Hubble, show temperatures of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius) in the planet's atmosphere, hot enough to melt silver. Eventually, he said, with the improved capabilities of spacecraft such as NASA's Kepler -- scheduled for launch in late 2007 or 2008 -- astronomers hope to be able not only to detect Earth-sized exoplanets, but also to analyze the composition of their air.

April 2005.  Next Big Things. By William Speed Weed. Popular Science. pages 72-81. These 10 telescopes won't just revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos, they’ll change everything we think a telescope can be…. On the following pages we profile 10 of the most important, audacious and powerful of these instruments, including a space telescope so large it must be folded to fit in the rocket, an orbiting laser system that can detect ripples in spacetime from colliding black holes, and an Antarctic neutrino detector that uses the mass of the Earth as a protective shield. 1.JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE __2.THIRTY METER TELESCOPE  __3.ICE CUBE __4.KEPLER. Waiting for the wink of a faraway world. Sponsor: NASA Location: Earth-trailing orbit around the sun Cost: $467 million Scheduled completion: 2007 url:kepler.arc.nasa.gov. Next time you look up at the stars, ask yourself that age-old question, set indelibly to music by Pink Floyd: Is there anybody out there …Imagine that our friendly alien is sitting on a planet that orbits its parent star “edge-on”: From our point of view, the planet ducks behind the star and then crosses, or transits, the face of the star as it cycles around. When the planet transits the face of the star, it will block a tiny fraction of that star’s light. The star will seem to dim—in essence, to wink. If we can see that dimming, we won’t know if our alien’s there. But we’ll know she’s got a rock to sit on…. Kepler is the brainchild of NASA Ames Research Center space scientist William Borucki, who began looking into the planet-detecting potential of transits in 1984, 11 years before any exoplanets had been discovered. Early on, he recognized how difficult it would be to detect transiting Earth-size planets. If every star in the sky has an Earth-size planet around it, from our point of view, only about one in 200 will be lined up edge-on and transit the face of the star. …To overcome the one-in-200 problem (or worse, as it’s likely that not all stars have Earth-size planets), Kepler will have to look at a lot of stars. The 0.95-meter telescope will point down one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way and capture a giant field of view: more than 100 square degrees of sky, 20 moon-diameters in each direction. And then it will wait. Unlike most telescopes, which search around the heavens for various interesting objects, Kepler will fix its gaze on the same 100,000 sunlike stars constantly for four years without moving. “If we’re looking for a star to wink, we can’t blink,” Borucki says. “Kepler will be a giant camcorder on the sky. If any one of those stars dims just a bit, we’ll see it.”… But here’s the most important thing: Kepler will look at a huge sample of stars. It is the first exoplanetary search that isn’t one-here, one-there. It will produce statistics. As a result, its conclusions will tell us much more than whether Earth-like planets exist. It will tell us how rare or common they are. “We’ll get a census of how many Earths there are on average,” Borucki says. “If we find a lot of Earths, there’s lots of life out there. If we don’t, well then, there’s no Star Trek.”

April 12, 2005. Search for Earthlike planets hot topic at NASA conference. Meeting in Boulder to draw 500 experts in astrobiology. By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News. BOULDER - ... About 500 astrobiology researchers - from such diverse disciplines as astrophysics, microbiology and theology - are expected to attend this week's meeting in Boulder. On Monday, eight panelists were asked to raise their hands if they believe Earthlike planets are common in the universe. Six of them gave the hands-up. "The gut feeling is that it's probable" that other habitable planets are out there, said panelist Norm Sleep of Stanford University, one of the six. But astronomers don't yet have the tools to detect and characterize such planets, he said.... Engineers at Boulder's Ball Aerospace & Technologies are developing a NASA spacecraft called Kepler that will scan the skies for Earth-sized planets later this decade....

12 April 2005. Look Out For Giant Triangles In Space - Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. By Marcus Chown. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could be taking the wrong approach. Instead of listening for alien radio broadcasts, a better strategy may be to look for giant structures placed in orbit around nearby stars by alien civilisations. "Artificial structures may be the best way for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation to signal its presence to an emerging technology like ours," says Luc Arnold of the Observatory of Haute-Provence in France. And he believes that the generation of space-based telescopes now being designed will be able to spot them. Arnold has studied the capabilities of space-based telescopes such as the European Space Agency's forthcoming Corot telescope and NASA's Kepler. These instruments will look for the telltale dimming of a star's light when a planet passes in front of it. They could also identify an artificial object the size of a planet, such as a lightweight solar sail, says Arnold. His work will be published in The Astrophysical Journal (www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0503580). Arnold has determined the characteristic transit signal that differently shaped objects would produce, including a Jupiter-sized equilateral triangle and a louvre - parallel slats with gaps between them. Corot and Kepler will be capable of distinguishing these objects from most planets, though they could still be confused with a ringed planet like Saturn, he says. To ensure the signal is unambiguous, an alien civilisation would have to launch a number of objects into orbit around a star. As an example, Arnold imagines 11 objects orbiting a star in groups of one, two, three and five - the first prime numbers. The time interval between each group could also encode prime numbers if the objects were powered rather than orbiting freely. He thinks any civilisation that can engineer giant structures in space would probably not find this a problem.

April 5, 2005. Habitable Planets: Disaster Zones and Safe Havens. By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer Space.com. New computer simulations of known extrasolar planetary systems suggest about half of them could harbor an Earth-like world, mathematically speaking

March 3, 2005. Astronaut Describes Search for Planets - The Kepler satellite will look for earth-sized planets. By Stefan Cornibert. Elementary students at Arlington Science Focus School got a lesson in outer space exploration Wednesday from Dr. Janice Voss, a former astronaut, who is now studying the cosmos in a new way....At a presentation Tuesday night, she also spoke to students and their parents about the nature of her current scientific work on the Kepler project, a satellite-based program that will search beyond our solar system for Earth-sized planets. Using a sophisticated array of light sensors, Kepler will scan the Cygus region of space over the course of four years, measuring the light fluctuations of dwarf stars — stars similar to the sun — for the telltale signs of planets passing in front of them, a technique known as “transit photometry.” .... "Ours is the first technique for finding Earth-sized planets." Finding the next Earth will likely prove a daunting task, she said. When a planet the size of Jupiter passes in front of a star, it decreases the star's light output by 1 percent. For a planet like Earth, the light is diminished by only .01 percent. Timing, Voss said, is the key. "You're looking for a six-hour dip in the light from a star that might only happen once a year," Voss said. "If you look away, you might miss it. What we're going to do is pick a part of the sky and just stare at it for four years."

04 March 2005 Planet search reveals smallest star ever. NewScientist.com news service. Maggie McKee. The smallest star ever detected has turned up in a search for extrasolar planets, a new study reveals. Astronomers say the find highlights the need to carefully confirm any "planet" detections made with future space missions. The star was one of nearly 200 objects detected passing in front of - or transiting - brighter companion stars during the planet-hunting OGLE survey in Chile. Once every week, the tiny object, called OGLE-TR-122b, crosses in front of a Sun-like star called OGLE-TR-122, dimming the light reaching Earth by 1.5%. ... future space missions, such as Europe's Corot, to be launched in 2006, and NASA's Kepler, planned for launch in 2007, will search for exoplanets simply by looking for transits, or dips in brightness, without taking mass into account. "Based only on the light curves, you cannot tell what you are observing," Melo told New Scientist. "When those space missions fly, we need to do ground-based spectroscopic measurements to confirm the nature of the transiting object."

14 Feb. 2005 NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. NEWS RELEASE: 05-07AR - NASA AWARDS CONTRACT FOR KEPLER MISSION PHOTOMETER
NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley, has awarded a new contract to Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. (BATC) of Boulder, Colo., to design, fabricate, assemble and test a photometer for the Kepler mission. The not-to-exceed value of this letter contract is $13.4 million; the estimated value of the total contract is $75.1 million, which is part of a five-phased acquisition. ...The Kepler mission is the first space mission specifically designed to detect Earth-size planets orbiting solar-like stars in their habitable zone. The habitable zone is that distance from a star where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet....The photometer will be used to measure the very small changes in a star's brightness caused by the repeated, periodic 'transit' of a planet in front of its star, as viewed from our solar system, ...Led by the project's principal investigator, William Borucki, and the project's deputy principal investigator, David Koch, both of NASA Ames, the science team is comprised of 27 scientists from 15 institutions in the United States, Canada and Denmark. NASA Ames will manage the photometer contract, while NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., will manage the spacecraft contract. ...Scientists expect this mission will detect numerous Earth-size planets around solar-like stars and hundreds to thousands of planets of various sizes, in various orbits around a wide variety of stars.