Is NASA going to launch a telescope that can detect earth size planets?
Shai Hulud asked:
I was watching Discovery channel last night, and there was a piece on some plans to launch a space based telescope that can detect earth size planets via the wobble method. Is this still planned to happen? What is the name of that telescope?
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I was watching Discovery channel last night, and there was a piece on some plans to launch a space based telescope that can detect earth size planets via the wobble method. Is this still planned to happen? What is the name of that telescope?
July 25th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
They already launched it. At least, that’s the hope, that it will detect “Earth-like” (I’m assuming that constitutes size and mass requirements, as well has “habitable zone” possibilities) planets around other stars.
It’s called the Kepler Mission.
July 26th, 2009 at 8:06 am
There is also a planned mission called the Terrestrial Planet Finder.
July 27th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Both the first 2 answers are good.
Kepler has already been launched, but TPF is still just a proposal.
Neither mission is using the wobble method though. Kepler will look for transits of planets and TPF will attempt to directly image the planets.
July 28th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
They did, called the Kepler Mission.
It uses a NASA space telescope designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
Orbiting the sun for at least 3.5 years, Kepler will continuously monitor the brightness of over 100,000 stars in a fixed field of view.
The data collected will be analyzed to detect periodic fluctuations that indicate the presence of transiting exoplanets.
So it isn’t using the wobble of the stars, but the change in brightness due to orbiting planets.