A few launch notes:
Kepler, the telescope designed to look for Earthlike planets around nearby stars, is due to launch on a Delta II on March 6. That’s still to be confirmed, but it looks good. Kepler will stare at about 100,000 stars and look for periodic dimming in them due to an orbiting planet passing in front of the star. It will be able to detect planets the size of Earth orbiting sunlike stars, so we may be on the verge of a very large breakthrough in exoplanet astronomy!
Also, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is due to launch on May 20. This is an ambitious Moon probe that will be able to take images of the lunar surface with a resolution of half a meter. Years ago I tried to pressure NASA to take Apollo landing site images and make them a high priority — I think the PR value alone would be fantastic, plus I’m curious to see how things may have changed. I expect the nylon in the flags has long ago succumbed to solar UV bombardment. But the rovers and landers will be big enough to see, though fuzzy. How cool would that be? I have no idea if they plan on doing that or not — as Jim Baen once said, "I just think that the space program reminds me of a government agency" — but maybe they’ll do it. We’ll see.
You can get launch news about non-Shuttle related rockets at NASA’s Expendable Launch Vehicle Status Reports page.
February 28th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Kepler on March the 6th! YAY!
February 28th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Cool!! Get the pictures! The PR would be fantastic, interest will be widespread.
And it will be the end of the moon hoaxers!! Or at least give them some new photos to demonstrate how little they know about photography again.
February 28th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
And I was waiting for a mission like the LRO for some time to finally photograph the landings sites and permanently confirm the Moon landings!
February 28th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Kepler is finally going up! I can hardly believe it.
February 28th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Great to see Kepler goin up.
February 28th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Well, Daniel J. Andrew:
The problem is that the Hoaxers will definitly claim that the pictures are photoshopped….
Hopefully those probes will do better than the last one that fell back into the ocean!
February 28th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Phil, I can’t remember the sites being mentioned by LRO teamers, but definitely insofar as LRO is a fulfillment of planners and the Academies’ priorities for this part of the Lunar Precursor Robotics spectrum. This was definitely mentioned in Scientific Context for the Exploration of the Moon.
Cheers!
February 28th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Back in 2004 I did a whole bunch of “live shots” brief live TV news interviews for the transit of Venus across the Sun. It was for NASA, and I was given talking points about Kepler (since it will look for planets using transits). So it’s odd to see it finally getting ready for launch.
February 28th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Phil,
Why wouldn’t they scan the Apollo sites? Are they in odd areas or something that wouldn’t get picked up normally?
February 28th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
By coincidence, Planck (with Herschel) will follow on April 16, another mission with ~ 3 years turnaround. WMAP knocked out some inflation theories, hopefully Planck will both confirm inflation at 3 sigma (I don’t think WMAP+COBE et cetera managed that) and constrain the possible theories further.
If not enemies of reason ever live in interesting times, at least scientists do! In 2-3 years…
February 28th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I was once the lowest undergrad data cruncher on Kepler.
Been waiting for this for a while.
Anyways… whoever finds the first habitable rock gets the last tube of toothpaste.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
@Shane P. Brady:
What would really be the point? The Hoaxers will simply scream, “Photoshopped!” And, NASA would have wasted whatever time and resources that could have gone into something more worthwhile.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Phil,
How do long do you think Kepler will be operating before we start to hear some rumblings of exo-planet goodness? I’ve read that we might have to wait the entire duration of the mission, until they capture 3 transits? If so, I guess it’ll be a small price to pay.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I am very excited about the launch of Kepler – but for different reasons than most. I am involved in the asteroseismology component of Kepler – something that is rarely mentioned. By staring at 100,000 stars for 3.5 years without interruption you can also look for other things than planetary transists; you can look for soundwaves at the surface of these stars (as fluctuations of their brightness). Measuring the frequencies of these soundwaves very accurately, we can do a so-called inversion and find the soundspeed and density profiles through the star – that is, we can actually observe the interior of the stars – right to the core! We have been doing this for the last 30 years for the Sun (helioseismology) and learned a wealth about the Sun and about atomic and plasma physics – now we can apply it to other stars on a grand scale and seriously test our stellar models. We can also measure the radius of the stars very accurately with this method.
Furthermore – there are a couple of quasars in the Kepler field of view, which means we can measure parallaxes (distances) of the stars with very high precision – which in the end means. we will actually know very accurately, what we are looking at. Quasars are good for measuring parallaxes (the apparent small elliptical motion of stars in the sky over one year, due to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun), because they are so far away that they don’t show any parallactic motion, and because they are so bright that we can still see them. So by using the quasar positions as the reference frame, it will be much easier to pick out the parallactic motions of the stars.
There is still a lot we don’t know about stars, and Kepler will help us get a better view.
Take a look at this site for more details: http://astro.phys.au.dk/KASC/seismology
Cheers, Regner
February 28th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
@Dan2: what they would want is three transits of the same object around the same star, to confirm that they are looking at periodic motion. Observing three transits would take two “years”, i.e. two orbits of that planet around its star. The time for one orbit will depend on the size of the star and the distance of the planet from it.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I hope Orbital Sciences isn’t the launch contractor! They sure screwed up OCO.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Michael L,
It would be cool just as Phil said, and I’m wondering why wouldn’t they be caught anyway.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
@MadScientist:
Name a launch provider with zero failures.
@BA Don’t forget our European friends, the launch of Herschel and Planck (on a single Ariane 5 ECA) is coming up in April. I sure hope we don’t lose that one, either would hurt, but both at once would be tragedy for astronomy.
http://www.esa.int/science/herschel
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Planck/index.html
February 28th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
There’s an extensive article in Selenology Today about the LCROSS mission which is launching with LRO. It will steer the spent lunar transfer stage into the moon. Specifically, it will impact near the pole to look for water.
The article is about how amateur astronomers can prepare for and image the impact.
P.S. I’m also psyched cause the author, K.A. Fisher, used one of my images in the article!
February 28th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Woah, you think the flags melted away or something??
That is sooo cool.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
If the orbiter takes pictures of the landing sites, you know that Hoax True Believers ™ will scream bloody “photoshop.”
If the orbiter doesn’t take pictures, then the HTBs will say, “Gee, I wonder why THEY didn’t take A picture. Maybe because there’s NOTHING there?!!”
There is nothing anybody can do to shake them out of their belief system, by now. However, a good public relations photo might persuade saner people to finally admit that we went to the moon. Once they understand we did it once, maybe they can convince our government to do it again.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
[Shane P. Brady] “Why wouldn’t they scan the Apollo sites? Are they in odd areas or something that wouldn’t get picked up normally?”
The resolution of the images taken by LROC are selected to achieve the science goals of the mission. Not all images are taken at the maximum resolution. There are limits imposed by bandwidth, memory, power, and thermal dissipation requirements. If the Apollo sites are not part of an imaging campaign at the highest resolution, 0.5 meter imagery will not be available.
Landing sites frequently *are* parts of imaging science campaigns so that photos taken from the surface can be placed in the larger context of surrounding geology (selenology or areology for those pedants among you).
February 28th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
@Regner Trampedach — Thanks for adding your comment and sharing that information. The details (and the website) were very interesting. Good luck with the new data.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Phil,
With the recent failure of the carbon detector satellite, is there much worry the same could happen to Kepler? I realize that all space launches are risky. Isn’t the same type of launch vehicle being used for Kepler?
February 28th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
OT –
I’m about halfway through Death, and it’s really good. Except for the gratuitous use of the word “literally”.
February 28th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Richard Says: “There is nothing anybody can do to shake them out of their belief system, by now.”
Actually, I don’t think this is the case. Talking to many HB’s over the years, nearly every one of them was born after the last Apollo mission. When you look at history all compressed into a tidy story it’s easy to pick and choose the parts to attack. For those of us who lived through it, there was a decade-long unfolding of events that had and absolute certainty about them.
I came to this realization when I’d ask HB’s if the shuttle was real, or the ISS was real. They always say “yes” to which I ask, “how do you know? Have you ever seen a shuttle launch?” The reason is that they have lived with the shuttle program nearly their entire lives. Same with all of the planetary probes like Magellan, Cassini and the Mars rovers. There is an authority to them that would be hard to deny when they show the remains of six LM bases and other equipment on the surface, exactly where we said they’d be.
I suspect the movement will lose a lot of steam once the photos are released. The true believers will just move on to a different conspiracy.
- Jack
February 28th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Actually, wouldn’t the savvier hoaxers repeat their “Unmanned Probes” mantra? I think that the “we couldn’t have gotten any vehicles there” argument is seen even by hoaxers as balderdash.
I expect that “why can’t we see the footprints?” will become the new cry of those who are determined to ignore all attempts of reality to thrust itself into their crania, where it might displace a juicy conspiracy story.
March 1st, 2009 at 12:07 am
@Mully410
No, Kepler is launching on Delta II, while OCO launched on Taurus. That said, all launch vehicles have failures. Delta II is among the best, with 138 successes in 140 attempts.
Glory http://glory.gsfc.nasa.gov/ is the next payload for Taurus, and obviously that won’t fly until the OCO incident investigation is complete.
March 1st, 2009 at 1:06 am
So photoshop in some footprints!
- Jack
March 1st, 2009 at 1:52 am
@Reed: My concern is not finding a provider with 0% failure, but you-know-who hasn’t really had a great record lately – is it just numbers catching up or is there too much testing being cut to claim cheaper services? It’s all sorts of hardware failure we’re talking about from various launch hardware (attitude stabilization, now fairings) through to satellite platforms. With only 8 launches of the Taurus XL, 2 have gone bad. Sure that could just be really bad luck, but you can’t just snort at the figures and say the future will prove a decent launch success rate.
March 1st, 2009 at 9:24 am
Hi Phil,
This is way off-topic but it aligns very well with what you’ve said about creationists. Thought you might enjoy the read:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/how_to_respond_to_requests_to.php#23more
The professor’s reply in a nutshell, “STFU until you can back your creationist BS with actual science.”
March 1st, 2009 at 12:20 pm
@Reed. Thanks!
March 1st, 2009 at 1:58 pm
FYI, (at least some) Apollo landing sites are high-priority for the LROC camera. First, they are very good places to image for instrument calibration, but also given the focus of LRO on exploration, they are good to see what kind of (known) hazards can be imaged from 50km altitude. We have ground truth already. For a list of targets, and if you want to give your input to the conference in June for LRO targeted information, check http://ser.sese.asu.edu/LSM/targeting.php
March 1st, 2009 at 2:56 pm
I’m thrilled by the prospect of Kepler detecting Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars within a few years. The overwhelming stupendousness of such a discovery can’t be overstated. But I’m curious about something – I recall seeing somewhere that someone had done simulations which showed that, contrary to earlier wisdom, planets could form in stable habitable-zone orbits around stars in some binary systems. If that’s correct, how tight are the current constraints on the existence of planets in the Alpha Centauri system, from transit searches, stellar wobble measurements, etc?
March 1st, 2009 at 8:32 pm
[...] LRO launches in May, the first U.S. lunar probe in many years. I certainly hope it’s the first of a renaissance in lunar exploration… so that we can join the rest of the world. [...]
March 1st, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Brenda,
Ha, nice! Just cought up with Friday’s BSG
March 1st, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Taking pictures of the Apollo sites for its own sake is good enough reason. Hoaxers or no hoaxers.
March 2nd, 2009 at 4:08 pm
I’m convinced you could take Bart Sibrel and his ilk to Tranquility Base personally, show them the base of the LEM, Neil and Buzz’s footprints and the flag, and they’d claim that you had actually induced a hallucination of the entire trip in their brains through advanced holographic technology that the government isn’t revealing to the world. There’s no evidence good enough to sway a True Believer ™.