NASA Data Used to Discover Eighth Planet Circling Distant Star

Abstract

Discovering the origins of life and colonizing extraterrestrial planets are two of the greatest ambitions that the international scientific community has today. Today, NASA is more prepared than ever to embark on an unprecedented race to conquer other worlds. The Kepler mission, named after Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer of the 16th-17th centuries, was scheduled to begin on March 7, 2009. In this mission, Space Agency released space from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, Florida, a Delta II rocket that will carry the Kepler space probe. It will try to identify Earth-like planets that orbitate stars similar to the Sun in a warm area of space, with liquid water and oxygen, that is, heavenly bodies that have all the conditions of life formation and maintenance. Kepler is looking for a new Earth. Kepler is a critical component of NASA's efforts to identify and study planets with Earth-like eco-conditions. The results of the Kepler space photometer will prove to be extremely important in understanding the frequency of Earth-sized planets in our galaxy. They will also plan future missions to directly detect and investigate such worlds near neighboring stars. Although more than 300 planets outside the solar system have already been identified by similar investigation technologies, Kepler's power resides in the high sensitivity of its instruments to smaller, cooler, more hospitable and more like us planes than all those identified so far. Kepler has a special telescope on board, which will study 100,000 astronomers from the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three and a half years. Scientists expect to discover hundreds of planets as large as the Earth or even larger, located at different distances from their stars. If the number of Earth-sized planets that have the potential to sustain life and be habitable of humans is great, Kepler could discover dozens of such celestial bodies; if they are rare, they may not discover any. "If we find that most stars have Earths, this implies that life development can be a common issue through our galaxy," says William Borucki, principal investigator at NASA's California Ames Research Center. "Discovery of only a few or a small number could indicate that we are alone in the Universe," the scientist added. Kepler's mission, according to the original English Kepler Mission, is a space mission, a cosmic station, a special cosmic ship and a space-based photometric telescope created and conducted by NASA to search for Terra planets in other solar systems. The Kepler cosmic station will observe and record the glow of more than 100,000 stars about 3-4 years in length to detect the periodic transition of a star's planets, a process of detecting the stars of a certain star called the transition method. The space mission is named in honor of German astronomer Johannes Kepler. A planet earth or a terrestrial planet in contrast to gaseous planets is a planet composed of rocks and metals that generally have three concentric shells (core or core, shell and bark or crust).