Kepler space telescope finds 1,091 new exoplanet candidates | Hacker News Reader

Kepler space telescope finds 1,091 new exoplanet candidates

wired.co.uk

22 pointsMRonney12 comments

Kepler is the most exciting mission that exists anywhere right now. We've always assumed that there might be lots of Earth-like planets, but here's our proof that the galaxy is littered with them.

However...

> In Barack Obama's proposed 2013 budget for Nasa, the president would cut Kepler's funding from $19.6 million to $13.6 million next year, then cut cash to the space telescope entirely from 2014.

Not okay. We need to fix this, asap.

Here's what I don't understand. How are scientific projects constantly having funding crises? The set of people who are most interested in seeing Kepler, JWST, etc. succeed strongly overlaps the set of people who have the sort of money needed to make these projects be successful without even significantly impacting their life style.

Asking as a stereotypically poor college student - why do these projects not have nontrivial amounts of "private" (not for-profit, just "private") funding?

So what's causing this trend towards smaller, slower stars?

For a telescope in our solar system to see an exoplanet in transit, the planet's orbit must be lined up edgewise to us. "The probability for an orbit to be properly aligned is equal to the diameter of the star divided by the diameter of the orbit," a spokesperson for Nasa, explains. ... Kepler's looking at thousands of stars, but because big planets are more likely to be found, they're going to come up early in the data.

They didn't get that quite right. While it's true that the transit probability is greater for large planets and that we'll find more of them, that doesn't explain a fractional increase in planets far from the star with time.

It's simpler. Planets far from the star take longer to go around. To confirm a transit and calculate the period, you need at least two, so the experiment must have gone on long enough for the planet to go around at least once. The long-periodicity planets are just beginning to show up because of this.

And we may have to wait even longer for the super long periodicity planets - for example, Neptune just finished its first orbit since discovery - in 2010.

There was a lady from SETI on All Things Considered last night talking about how they are pointing their scopes at some of these planets, pretty cool stuff!

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/28/147590627/seti-site-up-again-a...

Needs to be privatized and then we can keep Kepler up and get James Webb launched.

Privatized? What revenue model do you propose for making a profit finding extrasolar planets?

To be fair, nearly all ground-based observatories in the US are privately owned and operated. (Actually, they're almost all owned and operated by those evil corporations!) Most of the money that funds these observatories ultimately comes from the federal government, of course, but the fact that they're privately run gives them a great deal more flexibility than NASA-run observatories get. Although space-based observatories are generally more expensive than ground-based observatories, there are privately owned ground-based observatories being built of comparable size to Kepler.

Those evil corporations, though, are basically non-profits whose sole purpose is to manage the facilities.

For example: http://www.aura-astronomy.org/about.asp

"AURA is a consortium of universities, and educational and other non-profit institutions, that operates world-class astronomical observatories."

and http://www.keckobservatory.org/:

"The Keck Observatory is managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization whose board of directors includes representatives from Caltech and the University of California."

of comparable size to Kepler.

Well, Kepler is a <1m telescope, so as far as ground-based astronomy goes, that's something a reasonably well-funded liberal arts college can afford. Space makes all the difference.

Keep in mind that the cost to design and build a telescope like, say, Keck is roughly on par with the cost to merely launch a spacecraft like Kepler. In total the Kepler mission will end up costing nearly twice what it took to build the flagship ESO VLT observatory which includes 4x 8.2m diameter world-class telescopes. Space is expensive.

Licensing of any technologies developed for the projects or intellectual property created. I'm sure a smart company can figure out a way. If NASA/gov can't keep these projects alive someone with $ needs to step up.

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