The Kepler Mission : Mission # 10

Kepler -452b is believed to be a rocky planet and is said to be made up of a mix of silicon, carbon, magnesium and iron (elements found throughout Earth and other rocky planets) with active volcanoes, can keep water and oceans and an atmosphere that can hold gases. Simulations can prove that Kepler -452b is habitable as CO2 concentrations in its atmosphere are comparable and slightly lower than in Earth present day. With the help of models and research, we can assume that the planet is very likely to have a dense atmosphere due to it’s size and is too likely to carry liquid water. In addition, the sky is most probably blue similar that of to earth and if there were to be molecular oxygen in the atmosphere - produced by photosynthesis -, it could suggest native plant growth and can also host and allow Earth’s plants to photosynthesize due to the similarity of suns. Therefore, not only can learn to grow the local flora, but bring Earths to sustain ad create a greenhouse and/or gardens.

A red dwarf star’s HZ, for example, would be much closer to the star itself compared with that of our sun. It is also important to determine the planet’s size and mass, which is imperative in deciding whether it can sustain an atmosphere. Maintaining an atmosphere is essential for life to exist and small a planet with a small gravitational force at its surface may not be capable of retaining one. The Kepler transit data can only measure planet masses, diameters, orbital periods, and parent star types and although this information is useful for determining habitable zones, further data is required to determine true habitability. The latter can be done by studying the composition of the exoplanet’s atmosphere.

The exoplanet known as Kepler-453b is what is known as a circumbinary planet. A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars, and Kepler-453b is the tenth such planet discovered so far. It is a timely discovery not only because it was discovered at around the same time that news broke out of the world’s superpowers looking to make Star Wars a reality by waging war in space, but also because the real-life Tatooine was discovered by chance in a classic case of being in the right place at the right time.

This implies that the Kepler 11 planetary system is very much like our solar system. The distance (m) of Kepler-11b

Explore and observe the objects in the solar system to understand how they formed and evolve

The topic of finding life on another planet, or seeing if we are the only ones in our Universe has been a mystery to us since the beginning of time. One of the closest findings NASA has found to this topic was exoplanets. Exoplanet is defined as a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is the main telescope used to search for exoplanets that have similar features to Earth, and habitability on these exoplanets. NASA has found over 2,000 exoplanets so far, and out of those, there are only about eight exoplanets that seem to have a possibility on being a habitable exoplanets. Among these eight, Kepler 62f seems to be the most plausible.

NASA Confirms Planet Discovery Only 21 Light Year Away; Comments on Kepler 452b: 'So What Else Is New?'

Candidates must follow up observations and analyses to show that they are actual planets . However , Kepler-452b was identified by the Kepler space telescope , and its discovery was announced by NASA on 23 July 2015 .`` We`ve been able to fully automate our process of identifying planet candidates , which means we can finally assess every transit signal in the entire Kepler dataset quickly and uniformly`` said Jeff Coughlin, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View , California , who led the analysis of a new candidate catalog . `` This gives astronomers a statistically sound population of planet candidates to accurately determine the number of small , possibly rocky planets like Earth in our Milky Way Galaxy `` . Scientists now are producing the last catalog based on the original Kepler mission`s four year data set

Clearly the better and stronger our telescopes and other methods used to evaluate the sky will result in further discoveries. Not only do we have Earth bound telescopes; we have telescopes in the sky that can get even closer to other matter – whether that be planets, stars, comets, asteroids, etc. The textbook also notes radial velocity and how the gravitational pull of a planet results in the star wobbling. “If the wobble happens to occur along our line of sight to the star, then we see small fluctuations in the star’s radial velocity, which can be measured using the Doppler effect” (Chaisson & McMillan, 2014, p 371) allowing us to estimate the mass of the planet (Chaisson & McMillan, 2014, p 371). I found this website: http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/exoplanets/how-to-search-for-exoplanets.html that gives three ways. They are noted as radial velocity (already stated); transit photometry (having to do with the brightness – or lack thereof – of a star when another “planet passes between it and the Earth” (How to Search for Exoplanets)), and Microlensing (stated as the only real method that is capable of discovering other planets at huge distances from Earth (How to Search for Exoplanets)). It further notes that while radial velocity can identify them within 100 light years, transit photometry can identify them more than 100 light years (100’s in fact), and transit photometry can find those that are thousands of light years away. I need to understand

Let’s take a look at one of the first successful ways to find exoplanets, radial velocity, or watching for wobble, which is the gravitational interaction between a star and a planet. Radial velocity is one of the first successful way a star with a gravitational field that is much more powerful than a planet with less gravity than the star and its effects makes the star wobble and the size of the wobble can tell us how big or small the planet is. Another way of locating a planet is to find it during it transition, that is when it is in the directly between it host star and where it is being observed. The observer will notice a change in the light because of the planet blocking out the light from the host star. The best example of a planet being in transit is thinking of an eclipse, when our Sun is being blocked out we lose light for some time. When a planet is in this phase we are searching for shadows of other planets it is one of the best clues because the light curve indicates a lost in brightness. The light curve can give us a great deal of information about what size of the planet is or if there are more than one planet circling that star. The more light that is block will create a deeper light curve and that tell us that the planet is big. The longer the light is blocked out from the star also can tell us how far away from the host

Kepler-186f orbits its parent M dwarf stars once every 130-days and receives 1/3 the energy that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset. The system

While researching for a planet similar to earth I was very fascinated when I came across NASA’s Kepler Mission. The Kepler spacecraft launched in 2009 and its aim was to find earth-like planets. The following factors are what they use to classify the planet as “earth-like”: planet size, if there is water, and distance to a star which determines the temperature and quality of water. In order for the planet to be habitable the planet must not be too close to the sun or too far. If the planet is located in the habitable zone the water would not freeze from being too far and not boil from being too hot. The Kepler spacecraft which is essentially a telescope orbits the sun while it observes a long strip of view in space. The spacecraft records low

However, scientists now believe that this number is likely too low. The telescopes they were using can find bigger planets that are farther away from their stars. These are planets like Jupiter and Saturn. However, they could not find smaller planets that are close to their stars. These are planets like Mercury and Earth. Scientists needed another way to find smaller planets. They turned to NASA's Kepler telescope. Kepler was introduced in 2009. This telescope can detect planets as small as Earth—or even smaller.

The constant search for new life and curiosity of planets in solar systems beyond our own is another topic Hubble has researched. Planets are difficult to detect because their faint light is outshined by neighboring stars. True planets reflect a fraction of the light exerted upon them by the star, so they are very dim in comparison. Using a method called the “radial velocity method”, Hubble has detected hundreds of exoplanets, most of which are larger than Jupiter. As radial velocity gets more accurate, Hubble could detect “super-Earths”, which are smaller. This method can only provide information of the planet’s mass and orbit, so Hubble uses the another method to gather more detailed information on these alien worlds. The transit method is

This mission’s spacecraft is the second designed for NASA’s New Frontiers, with the first being Pluto New Horizons launched in 2006. New Frontiers is a program focused on medium-sized missions that are of crucial importance to the objectives of the Decadal Solar System Exploration Survey. It focuses on the building of a solid understand of planetary science, with priorities set by the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council.