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telescope terrestrial

 

Nasa'S Kepler Mission Rockets Into Space In Search Of Other Earths - Are We Alone?

March 6th the hunt for life in Space started a new era.

NASA's Kepler Mission Rockets into Space in Search of Other Earths

NASA's Kepler mission successfully launched

NASA launched its new space telescope called Kepler on March 6th 2009 and will attempt to bring the human race a step closer to the eternal question - are we alone?

It is an historical project as we can be able to get new perspectives on human life itself.

Some fundamental questions will be attacked in this mission that has been part of human quest for a long time, ever since the humans began to look up into the sky and see the world of stars above our heads.

Measuring extreme low changes in strength of light, will enable the telescope to find habitats similar to our earth in space.

Researchers believe strongly that there are billions of planets like ours within our own Milky way system. Some of these may have the potential of life.

Kepler telescope will look for earth like planets in a distance from the sun, similar to the distance earth has. In this zone of interest there will be potential for water, which again will give raise to potential of sustainable life as we know it. The larger amount of planets similar to ours, the larger chance there is for finding life forms.

Kepler is looking out for small objects in a distance of over three thousand light years, which is really hard to grasp for human mind. It is a large distance, and the objects we are looking for, are very small. Kepler has the ability to detect these small objects at these distances due to its high sensitivity of the equipment onboard.

On of the researchers on the Kepler team, William Borucki, said they will not be able to find E.T himself, but maybe find his home. Maybe in the future it will be possible to establish whether these objects have life on them, and observe its activities. However, at the moment, we do not have the technology to determine this.

As long as we receive light from these planets, we will be able to analyze and observe chemical substances and look for signatures of life.

The first exo planet in orbit around another star was discovered first time in 1995 and there has been found another 342 new ones since then. However, most of these giant planets are made of only gas, like our own Jupiter and Saturn, and they are extremely hot. None of these are believed to be like our planet. These objects are different from our earth planet, and can not have life as we know about from our knowledge at this moment. These objects are very close to their star, and are probably being fried by their sun.

Technology has not enabled us so far to detect other objects than these 341 ones, and its not s sign of that there are not objects like our earth present in these regions.

The question everybody has asked themselves through history of science is if our solar system is unique and out of the ordinary or it is quite normal out in deeper space what we have in our solar system. Kepler telescope is a space based system that will enable us to tell us more about this, as terrestrial based systems are to prone to noise and signal dampening to be able to detect things Kepler telescope will be able to.

Kepler telescope will be able to continuously observe more than 100.000 stars that are up to three thousand light years away from us in the Cygnus Lyra region of the Milky way system.

The telescope will be in earth orbit for over three years before the researchers can determine whether we have detected a similar object as the photo (Pale blue dot) from the astronomer Carl Saga showed the world of earth from a satellite far away from earth (farthest away ever taken of earth).

If Kepler telescope does not detect anything, it will establish theories about our place in the universe, which will remodel some theories existing today.  Researchers' states they would be surprised if they do not find anything with Kepler.

 

About the Author

He has a background as civil engineer and geoscientist. He has worked mainly within the oil and gas industry from the mid 1980s. He has written a few fictional novels as well as being the author of some professional litterature within oil and gas sector, he is now an editor of some web sites.

Is this true that Powerful new telescopes will shed light on terrestrial planets around distant stars,?

Powerful new telescopes will shed light not only on gas giants but on the abundance of smaller, terrestrial planets around distant stars, and will also show whether their orbits are stable and protected by larger planets from cosmic bombardment.

New telescopes might find evidence of planets enshrouded in ozone and oxygen, which in sufficient concentrations imply the existence of life.

Our detection methods and optics and interpretation of spectra get better all of the time.

A few decades ago, no one would have suspected that we would have identified one exoplanet, let alone 333, simply by observing a stars "wobble." But it makes sense. That's pretty much the same method we used to find Uranus and Neptune. We observed perturbations in the known (nearby) planets' orbits, and were able to find the planets "Tugging" on them, which is essentially the same thing that is causing the wobbles of the stars... a gravitational "tug."

Pretty much all of our exoplanet studies are done indirectly. I think I have heard that a few have actually been imaged, but for the most part, everything we currently know about the ones we have discovered is from indirect analysis of data. (I.E. when a planet transits its star, we can observe the difference in the spectra from the star, and determine which elements are present in the planet.)

I've also recently been informed about "finding developing solar systems" (great article, if you can find a copy of the February 2009 issue of Astronomy magazine, it's a good read.)

Terrestrial planets are going to be hard to find, simply because, so far as we know... they are much less massive and much less voluminous in comparison to the "hot-jupiters" and other massive exoplanets we have been finding.

Nonetheless, technology, and accurate interpretation of observational data increases in this field rather quickly, this is certainly a topic of interest and it is growing in valid detection techniques.

Have you read up on the Humble Space Telescope (yes I spelled that right, I am not referring to Hubble)? MOST (those Canadians are awesome!)? I think that one is the project you would be *most* (hahahaha, yes, pun intended) interested in.

telescope terrestrial