Overview:
The Kepler
Mission, launched on March 7, 2009, is a program implemented by NASA, with the
goal of finding potentially life supporting planets within the habitable zone
of their parent stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. These planets are being explored
with the help of the Kepler spacecraft. So far the Kepler spacecraft has been
able to detect thousands of planet candidates, with as many as 40 billion total
planet candidates possibly residing within the Milky Way Galaxy. Currently the
Kepler Mission is delayed due to a spacecraft malfunction, a new Kepler mission
objective is currently being discussed.
Kepler Spacecraft:
The Kepler
spacecraft is a space observatory designed and launched by NASA to find
Earth-like planets orbiting a parent star. The Spacecraft has a mass of 1,039
kilograms and utilizes a system of strategically placed mirrors for its
telescope. It has about a 12 degrees diameter field of view, which is only
about the size of ones fist when it is held at arms length. The Kepler
spacecraft is able to catch its amazing images with the help of 42 CCDs at
2200x1024 pixels, which at its time of launch, made it the largest camera to be
launched into space. Kepler orbits the sun at a height of 1AU and a period of
372.5 days. Kepler points its photometer to a field in the northern
constellations of Cygnus, Lyra, and Draco, which assures that light from the
sun, earth, and other stray light, doesn’t disrupt the sensitive light
detectors of the photometer. Kepler is operated out of the Boulder, Colorado at
the University of Colorado.
Kepler Mission:
Other extrasolar
planets founds on projects prior to the Kepler mission, were all the size of
Jupiter or larger. The Kepler spacecraft is specially designed to look for planets
30 to 600 times less massive, in order to assure that these planets are more to
the order of Earth’s mass. The Kepler spacecraft roams the Milky Way Galaxy
locating Earth-sized exoplanets within the habitable zone of a sun-like star,
such exoplanets are called “Goldilock planets” because they are not too larger
or small, or too far or close to their star, but instead just right!
Discoveries:
 |
| Kepler-69c |
The method the
Kepler spacecraft uses to locate exoplanets is called the transit method of
planet finding. This method involves detecting the depletion of light that
occurs when a planets passes in front of its parent star. If the object causes
these light depletions on a regular basis, it indicates that it is indeed a
planets, and the planet’s size can be calculated from the brightness change,
and the planet’s orbit and temperature can be calculated from the time between
transits. The photometer has the ability to detect a brightness depletion of
1/100 of a percent. http://kepler.nasa.gov/multimedia/Interactives/HowKeplerDiscoversPlanetsElementary/flash.cfm
this simulator animates how the Kepler spacecraft detects new exoplanets, and
how the information is then transmitted back to Earth. As of now, the Kepler
spacecraft has been able to find 167 confirmed earth-sized “goldilock”
exoplanets, with thousands of other unconfirmed exoplanets that are still being
observed and researched. Scientists have estimated that there are at least 50
billion planets within the Milky Way Galaxy, and at least 500 million of these
planets are within the habitable zone of their parent stars. The first
Earth-sized exoplanets discovered by the Kepler spacecraft, were announced on
December 20, 2011. These planets included Kepler-20e, and Kepler-20f, which
orbit within the habitable zone of their parent star Kepler-20. Although,
possibly Kepler’s best exoplanets discovery, and one of its most recent, that
is a “prime candidate to host alien life” is Kepler -69c. Kepler-69c is 70%
larger than Earth is 2,700 light years away in the constellation Cygnus.
Currently:
As of now the
Kepler spacecraft is in a state of rest due to the crippling of two of its
reaction wheels. In July 2012 wheel 2 of the Kepler spacecraft fail, later on
May 11, 2013, wheel 4 of the spacecraft also failed. Due to the loss of the
proper functioning from these two wheels, the Kepler spacecraft can no longer
continue its current mission of hunting for Earth-sized exoplanets because it
no longer possesses the ability to sufficiently point with accuracy using the
transit method. A new mission objective for the Kepler spacecraft is currently
being discussed, and such mission candidates include searching
for asteroids and comets, looking for evidence of supernovas, and finding huge
exoplanets through gravitational
microlensing.
Conclusion:
With the
estimation of 500 million planets within the habitable zone of a star, out of
the 50 billion planets within the Milky Way Galaxy zone alone, it appears as
though it is very unlikely that there exists no other life elsewhere in the
universe, considering that there are 50 billion other galaxies. Theoretically,
this provides the potential for one-sextillion Earth-like goldilock planets
alone, within the universe. Considering there are at least 30,000 habitable
planets within only 1,000 light years of Earth, it is only a matter of time
until alien life is discovered.
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