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2008 May 14. U.S. plans year of space missions. BY ROBERT S. BOYD • MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS - freep.com. Mars landing is first in the lineup....
2008 May 9. Elvis, bin Laden and Hitler Join Mission to Mars. by Nell Greenfieldboyce, All Things Considered, National Public Radio (NPR). Excerpt: When the Phoenix lander touches down on Mars later this month, so will the names of thousands of people... Elvis Presley, Donald Duck, John Lennon and Adolf Hitler are all onboard the Phoenix lander. Courtesy of the Planetary Society. ...If names are tricky, what about essays? NASA is soliciting 500-word messages that will rocket into space next year onboard the Kepler spacecraft, which will search for Earth-like planets. David Koch, who works on the project at NASA's Ames Research Center, says he hopes millions of people will sign up. "If somebody wants to submit Mickey Mouse as a name, that's fine with me," he says. And if someone wants to write something offensive, even something racist and nasty, "if that's what they want to do, I'll let them." He says that doesn't mean NASA endorses those views. Koch just doesn't like restrictions, because "the whole idea is to let people show their enthusiasm for the space program," he says. "If somebody wants to be a downer, I'll let them be a downer. People do have those instincts sometimes."....[audio online]
Other articles on the Name in Space:
2008 May 8. Throngs rove through JPL. Mary O'Keefe, La Cañada Valley Sun. Excerpt: Close to 30,000 visitors got a up close and personal view of space exploration during Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s annual open house on May 3 and 4.
...One popular area was the search for Earth-like planets. A demonstration of the “wobble” effect was made simple with markers, a globe and a weight. A marker was placed on the bottom of a globe that represented a star, as it turned the inked circle remained small. Then a weight was added to the side of the globe representing the gravitational pull of a planet. With this added the pen drew a bigger, “wobbly” circle. This wobble effect helps scientists find smaller planets near large stars.
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The display area also included information on Kepler, the first space mission to search for habitable Earth-size and smaller planets. With a planned launch in 2009, the spacecraft will continuously monitor over 100,000 stars similar to the Sun measuring the light variations. When a planet passes in front of its parent star, like when the Earth moves in front of the Sun, it is known as a transit. Kepler will search for transits of distant “Earths.”
2008 May 5. Another (Better) Opportunity to Send Your Name to Space
Written by Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today. Excerpt: ...Earlier today, Ian reported on how the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission is offering the chance for the public to 'ride along' to the moon by sending their names to be added to a computer chip which will be embedded on the spacecraft. Well, not to be outdone, the upcoming Kepler mission that will search for Earth-sized exoplanets is offering the same chance. But this is no sluff opportunity where you just fill in your name and you're done: you've got to work a little and be creative! The Kepler folks would like you to also state in 100 words or less why you think the Kepler mission is important. I think that's a great idea, and I'm going to add my name and statement right away. But there's more reasons why I prefer the Kepler mission's approach to sending your name to space:
- Your name will be in an exciting Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, going around the sun every 372.5 days.
- This activity is done in association with the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
- Your name will be on the spacecraft that will likely identify the first Earth-sized or smaller planet orbiting another star.
- Your name will be launched on board a Delta II rocket.
- Your name will be part of the mission that will determine the frequency of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars.
...So, here's where you can add your name....
2008 Mar 24. Searching for Earth. By Henry Bortman. Astrobiology Magazine. Excerpt: More than 250 planets have been found orbiting distant stars. Most of them are “hot Jupiters,” giant planets orbiting close to their stars, unlikely places for life to take hold. NASA’s Kepler mission hopes to find habitable planets like Earth. Or, perhaps, to discover that there aren’t many of them around to find. ...NASA’s Kepler spacecraft will search for Earth-size planets around more than 100,000 stars. ...It is “NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-size and smaller planets around other stars,” says David Koch, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Calif., and the Deputy PI on the Kepler project. Koch and his colleagues have successfully completed a critical test of the telescope’s imaging system, using hardware identical to what will be used on the spacecraft.
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The dimming caused by a transit is miniscule: one-hundredth of one percent for an Earth-size world. For comparison, imagine you’re inside looking out through a window. If you open the window and look directly out, the change in light intensity is about one percent. Kepler’s detectors will find Earth-like planets by measuring changes more than one hundred times as small.
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Koch says, “if you were to get back away from our solar system and look at the Earth transiting our sun, and it went right across the center of the disk of our sun, that would take 13 hours.” By noting the timing of a sequence of a planet’s transits and knowing the mass of the star that the planet orbits, the Kepler team will be able to calculate the planet’s distance from the star. How much a star’s light dims during a transit will indicate how large the planet is. Larger planets block more starlight.
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Kepler’s designers expect to detect about 50 planets as small as Earth in the habitable zones of their stars, assuming stars have both an Earth- and a Venus-size planet. They’ll detect hundreds if most stars have smaller planets close-in and if there is an abundance of super-Earth-size planets.
These discoveries would be a clear indication that planets like ours are common in our galaxy. But, says Koch, not finding those 50 planets will also be a meaningful result. “If we expect 50 and we get nothing, or 1 or 2, then we can say, you can know, Earth-like planets are not common. Just as profound a result.” In either case, once its four-year mission is complete, scientists will have a far more detailed picture of the distribution of planets in our galaxy than they do now.
...Kepler will have 42 CCDs, each about 1 x 2 inches, containing a total of 95 megapixels. By comparison, the CCDs on digital cameras are about the size of a thumbnail and even top-of-the-line professional cameras typically contain about 10 to 12 megapixels. ...The launch is scheduled for February 2009.
2008 Mar 3. Creating a "phone-book for ET". By Gideon Bradshaw, BBC News. Excerpt: ...in early 2007, a Swiss team of astronomers led by Professor Stephan Udry working at the European Southern Observatory in northern Chile ... identified the smallest planet orbiting a main sequence star yet found in our galaxy... Gliese 581c. It was only five and a half times the mass of our Earth and seemed to be at just the right distance from its star to be habitable. ...Other scientists are more sceptical. Professor Geoff Marcy is the world's most prolific planet hunter. ...He too has studied G581c and is convinced that it is not habitable.
So, the hunt for the first incontrovertible Earth-like planet continues, and a new competitor is about to enter the race. ...In 2009 Nasa will launch Kepler, a space telescope with a mission to seek out new worlds. Horizon visited the factory where Kepler is being built, in the company of its creator, Dr Bill Borucki. ...Kepler is designed to be sensitive enough to detect Earth-like planets from day one. It will scan an incredible 100,000 stars day and night for four years.
After this time, we will know for sure just how common Earths are in the Milky Way.
Nasa's most pessimistic calculations predict that at least 50 Earth-like planets should exist within this collection of stars.
This would be the first galactic map of Earth-like planets, a "phone-book for ET".
2008 Feb 25. NASA to search galaxy for 'earthlike' planets. By Wayne Freedman, ABC7. Excerpt: MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA (KGO) -- Of all the digital cameras on planet Earth, you have never seen one like this. David Koch, an astronomer at NASA Ames in Mountain View, has just concluded a series of experiments that will open one pane in a window to the stars. It's a space-based telescope called Kepler. It will focus on a small section of our Milky Way Galaxy, searching for places where life might be.
ABC7 Reporter Wayne Freedman: "You're the man who will discover the first earthlike planet?"
Dr. David Koch: "That's right. That's the whole reason for doing this mission...."
2008 Feb 21. NASA Ames Conducts Tests of Kepler Mission Image Detectors. Space Ref (press release) - USA. Sensitive detectors that may help find habitable planets orbiting distant stars as part of NASA's Kepler Mission are undergoing tests at Ames Research .... See also Universe Today article.
2008 Jan 1. Wielding a Cost-Cutting Ax, and Often, at NASA. By WARREN E. LEARY, NY Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON - In Washington, it almost seems radical - completing government projects at their original budgeted cost.
...In his eight months on the job, the director, S. Alan Stern, has turned back almost a half-dozen requests for more money from projects experiencing cost overruns, he said. That has forced mission leaders to trim parts of their projects, streamline procedures or find other sources of financing.
...NASA devotes about $5.4 billion a year to its science program, divided among specialties like astrophysics, earth science and planetary exploration. To finance President Bush's exploration initiative to return humans to the Moon, while also financing space shuttle operations and a shuttle replacement out of the agency's approximately $16 billion annual budget, science program money is being held to about a 1 percent increase per year for four years.
Factoring in inflation and the loss of what had been anticipated financing increases, space experts say this amounts to a loss for NASA science of about $3 billion over that period.
...One of the first targets in his effort to attack cost overruns was the Kepler mission, a project started in 2001 to launch a planet-hunting telescope. Because of management problems, technical issues and other difficulties, the price tag went up and the launching date slipped from the original 2006 target.
In 2006, NASA resolved itself to a 20 percent cost overrun, which raised the price to $550 million, and accepted a 2008 launching time. Then the Kepler team came to Dr. Stern last spring with a request for an additional $42 million.
"Four times they came for more money and four times we told them 'no,'" Dr. Stern said.
After Dr. Stern's team threatened to open the project to new bids so other researchers could take it over using the equipment that had already been built, the Kepler group came up with a solution. Among other measures, the duration of the four-year mission was cut by six months and preflight testing was scaled back.
"When they came to believe I was serious and had my boss's backing," Dr. Stern said, "they took it seriously. They quickly found a way to erase that bill."....
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