Readings on the planet HAT-P-7b indicate that the craft's instruments should be able to spot relatively small planets in the habitable zones around stars in our galaxy, scientists say.
By John Johnson Jr.
August 7, 2009
NASA's planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, has made radical new discoveries about a hellish planet a thousand light years away -- proof, scientists say, that the craft will be able to carry out its mission of finding other Earths in our galaxy, provided they exist.
NASA scientists released Kepler's analysis Thursday of an already known "hot Jupiter" planet called HAT-P-7b in the constellation Cygnus. The spacecraft mapped the planet's orbit and gave new details about its hazy, ozone-like atmosphere, where temperatures climb as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The analysis proves that Kepler's onboard telescope and light-detecting instruments are at least 100 times more precise than the ground-based detectors that originally found HAT-P-7b, the scientists said at a briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington. That should be good enough to spot any pint-sized planets -- about the size of Earth -- in a star's so-called habitable zone, where temperatures are warm enough for water to be liquid but not so hot as to torch the planet's surface.
"Kepler has the ability to detect Earth-sized planets," Alan Boss, an astrophysicist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said at the briefing. "The question that remains is: How many Earths are there?"
Kepler, which was launched in March, is the first spacecraft with a mission to find potentially habitable worlds. Over the next few years, as it circles the sun in an Earth-trailing orbit, it will scan 100,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, looking for planets.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-kepler7-2009aug07,0,4825712.story
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