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KEPLER SPACE TELESCOPE SERIES

The two worlds, Kepler-36b and 36c are only 1.2 million miles apart at their closest – about 20 times closer than any two planets within our own solar system.

June 21st, 2012 – A celestial pair of planetary twins is announced.

Some 1,500 light-years from Earth, this planet is slowly disintegrating as it orbits its parent star and could be gone in as little as 200 million years.

May 18th, 2012 – The discovery of a super-Mercury is announced, but this planet is not like any other.Of those, some 30,000 were thought to lie within a thousand light-years of the Earth. Based on the data, scientists estimated there could be as many as fifty billion planets in the Milky Way, including about two billion Earth-sized worlds with at least half a billion in the habitable zone. Of those, 207 were Earth-sized, 680 were about twice the size of the Earth, 1,181 were the size of Neptune, 203 were Jupiter-sized and 55 were thought to be larger than Jupiter. How Did Kepler Telescope’s Primary Mission Come to an End?īy the end of 2011, there were 2,326 exoplanet candidates. Unfortunately, neither of those two worlds lay within the habitable zone. One, Kepler-20f, was the first exoplanet discovered to be smaller than the Earth. The star, Kepler-20, lies some 929 light-years away and has five exoplanets in orbit. December 20th, 2011 – Astronomers announce the discovery of the first Earth-sized planets orbiting a Sun-like star.Unlike the fictional planet of Tatooine in the famous movies, Kepler-16b is a cold Saturn-sized gas giant. September 15th, 2011 – Star Wars fans rejoice as the first exoplanet found orbiting a double star system is announced.The star, Kepler-11, is Sun-like so the worlds are too hot to support life. What makes this system so special is that five of the planets have orbits smaller than Mercury’s, making it one of the most compact systems known. February 2nd, 2011 – Astronomers announce the discovery of six planets orbiting a single star some 2,150 light-years away.Neptune-sized 4b is the smallest while the others are all about the size of Jupiter. In all, there are five new worlds, called Kepler-4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b.

January 4th, 2010 – During a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, scientists announce the first exoplanets discovered by Kepler telescope.

Scientists also hoped to discover dozens of Earth-sized worlds, but only time would tell if the telescope would be successful.Ĭontinuously pointed toward the same area of sky, around the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, the telescope studied approximately 150,000 stars in an area containing 4.5 million stars over 115 square degrees (or roughly a 0.25% of the entire night sky.) Hold your fist out at arm’s length and it would cover about the same area!Īn artist’s concept of the Kepler-16 system, the discovery of the first planet orbiting a multiple star. At the time, some 350 exoplanets were known to exist and it was hoped the telescope would discover thousands more during the course of its three and a half year mission. It was finally launched on March 7th, 2009, aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The cameras were designed to detect the brightness changes of stars as planets appeared to transit across them. Also, on-board were 42 CCD cameras, each with a resolution of 2,200 x 1,024 pixels, giving a total resolution of nearly 95 megapixels.

The Kepler telescope itself comprised of a primary mirror 1.4 meters (55 inches) in diameter – the largest of its kind at its launch. When was the Kepler Telescope First Launched? Given that its mission was to discover potentially habitable Earth-sized planets, and that those discoveries relied upon the laws of planetary motion, it seemed only appropriate that the telescope is named after Kepler. It would be almost another ten years and four rejected proposals before the telescope was finally approved, in December of 2001.

KEPLER SPACE TELESCOPE SERIES

Most famously, he discovered the laws of planetary motion that have since allowed us to accurately predict the positions of the planets for almost any time in history.įour hundred years later, in the early 1990s, NASA proposed a series of unmanned missions – some to investigate our solar system and others to search for other planets orbiting other stars. Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There’s a precedent for naming space hardware after historic astronomers, and the Kepler telescope is no exception.