News NASA to Reveal Big News from Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Thursday

[statisticsnerd]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/nasa-to-announce-latest-kepler-findings-100823.html

NASA is expected to make an announcement Thursday on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of space for evidence of other worlds.
The space agency has scheduled an afternoon teleconference with reporters to announce the results from Kepler, which include the "discovery of an intriguing planetary system," NASA officials said Monday.
Participating in the teleconference will be senior NASA scientists and Kepler mission researchers, including principal investigator William Borucki, at the space agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

The Kepler space observatory hunts for Earth-like planets around other stars. In June, mission scientists announced it had found over 700 candidates, including five systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet.
The spacecraft monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate that alien planets are passing in front of them as seen from Earth. To date, astronomers have discovered more than 400 planets lurking around stars beyond our solar system.
NASA launched the $600 million spacecraft in March 2009. It is currently staring at a patch of the Milky Way that contains over 156,000 stars – a star field in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.
Astronomers have been using the data from Kepler to determine whether orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.
Follow-up observations are necessary to distinguish between actual planets and false alarms such as binary stars, which are two stars that orbit each other.

What do you think it is?? Have they discovered ET??

 

[SiberianTiger]

What do you think it is?? Have they discovered ET??

Surely, I think one of the recent Kepler images was:

 

[Keatah]

No, they have not discovered life. And -- They'll never tell us there is life there, even if they find it. It would mess up religions too much. too many established dichotomies and philosophies and theologies would need to change. The place would be in a major upheaval.

They'll show some transit dots and blurry smears and stuff like that.

 

[garyw]

What they are likely to annonce are a few super Earths inside the habitable zone of a star. There is a very slim chance that they might have been able to snatch a spectroscopic analysis of one worlds atmosphere and detected Oxygen but beyond that don't expect any major new revelations.

 

[Keatah]

Well that's ok - And more in-line with developments over the past 5-years. *THIS* is what the space program should be like! Unmanned spaceprobes rock!

Anyways, I would prefer Earth-sized planets and stuff like that. Bigger planets are scary and freak me out somehow..

I wonder what drilling for oil would be like on a bigger Earth-type body? What would the tectonics be like?

Would a bigger planet evolve beings that make different types of electronics than what would be constructed on "regular" sized planets?

 

[garyw]

I wonder what drilling for oil would be like on a bigger Earth-type body? What would the tectonics be like?

That would mean fossils which would mean life which would mean no drilling because the exobiologists would want to probe the hell out of those fossils to work out what sort of life.

 

[Moach]

Well that's ok - And more in-line with developments over the past 5-years. *THIS* is what the space program should be like! Unmanned spaceprobes rock! (...)

HAIL the PROBE! :hail::hail::hail:


couldn't resist it, right? :lol:

 

[RisingFury]

No, they have not discovered life. And -- They'll never tell us there is life there, even if they find it. It would mess up religions too much. too many established dichotomies and philosophies and theologies would need to change. The place would be in a major upheaval.

They'll show some transit dots and blurry smears and stuff like that.

No.

When the Martian meteorite ALH84001 and showed evidence of life, nobody went into upheaval and the world's major religions survived. In fact, the story wasn't the biggest one in newspapers of that day.

Religions survived many scientific discoveries that contradicted their holy books and they will survive the possible discovery of life.

 

[T.Neo]

Oh boy! Potentially habitable super-Earths! With potential oxygen in their potential atmospheres! :woohoo:

If anything, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe will strengthen religious faith in many people. I don't understand where the idea that the discovery of alien life would mess up religious beliefs comes from.

That would mean fossils which would mean life which would mean no drilling because the exobiologists would want to probe the hell out of those fossils to work out what sort of life.

For some reason I don't think oil or oil-like deposits are going to contain any structures within them (but coal is a good example, often fossils of gigantic insects and whatnot are found in coal deposits).

Fossils on another planet are an interesting possibility though. One should not only think of the present biology of alien life, but also how it came to be.

 

[Ghostrider]

Religions survived many scientific discoveries that contradicted their holy books and they will survive the possible discovery of life.

And actually, many religions have no problems at all with extraterrestrial life. If I remember correctly, the Vatican issued a communiqué some years ago to the effect that "believing in the existence of extraterrestrial life not being in any way contrary to the teaching of the Church".

 

[orb]

I guess these are those news - NASA:

• Media Telecon: First Discovery of Two Planets Transiting a Sun-Like Star.
• NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Two Planets Transiting the Same Star.

 

[T.Neo]

Oh yeah, that's so exciting. :dry:

 

[Yoda]

WOW !!!!!!.............not............
That's it ??????????
That's the BIG news????????????

Rather disappointing in my view since we all know that stars can have multiple planets in orbit around it.
Not even worth having a news-conference for :facepalm:
Yet another NASA waste of TV time and Money

 

[RisingFury]

WOW !!!!!!.............not............
That's it ??????????
That's the BIG news????????????

Well, what were you expecting?

A very low number of solar systems actually have a good enough orientation and even fewer contain Earth size planets.

If you're looking for planets in the habitable zone you're looking at around 1 year period, which means years can pass before you actually confirm there's a planet there. Kepler's been up for just under a year and a half and collecting data like a year...

If Kepler finds 5 Earth like planets (including super Earths) in the habitable zone within Kepler's planned 3.5 mission life time, we'll be lucky.

Oh boy! Potentially habitable super-Earths! With potential oxygen in their potential atmospheres!

Atomic oxygen, sure. AFAIK there's no natural process outside of life, that can create molecular oxygen.

 

[Hielor]

Atomic oxygen, sure. AFAIK there's no natural process outside of life, that can create molecular oxygen.

Except that if two oxygen atoms meet in the wild, they'll bind to form O2...

 

[T.Neo]

Atomic oxygen, sure. AFAIK there's no natural process outside of life, that can create molecular oxygen.

Yeah, because non-biogenic oxygen is so exciting.

Isn't the oxygen in the atmospheres of Mars and Venus diatomic? There isn't a lot of it, but still... I don't see how hard it would be for diatomic oxygen to form, purely out of reactions between oxygen molecules.

I'm still royally disappointed with NASA. I mean, sure it's news for their mission, but it isn't like "STOP THE PRESSES- WE DISCOVERED LIFE" etc. In planetary terms these aren't really that impressive.

 

[orb]

And here's article from Astronomy Now: Kepler finds first double planet transiting system.

 

[Orbinaut Pete]

BBC News: "Kepler spies Saturn-sized worlds".

MSNBC Cosmic Log: "Planets' clockwork goes crazy".

NASA TV Video: "First Multi-Planet System Discovered by Kepler".​

 

[Keatah]

I believe there is a considerable lack of understanding, critical thinking, and, comprehension when one reads news headlines. While it is important to be able to read, it is equally important to understand what you read.

The news headlines read --

"NASA is expected to make a major announcement today on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of space for evidence of other worlds. The space agency has set an afternoon teleconference with reporters to discuss the results from Kepler, which include the "discovery of an intriguing planetary system," according to a space agency statement released Monday. [The Strangest Alien Planets]"
(from space.com)


The article states the announcement is about how the spacecraft is working and how well(or not) it is collecting data. And "intriguing" to a scientist is often as boring as the debate about which way you hang your toilet paper; when being interpreted by a layman. Somehow we got all carried away with 'misconceptions about alien life and everything.
we have two major points to pick out here
1 - major news on the ability of the spacecraft to gather data and/or perform daily operations.
2 - discovery of something of interest to scientists.. yeh I like that one! That could mean anything. Remember, scientists can get interested in the most trivial thing and blow it out of proportion. I mean who cares about the mating cycle of the fruit fly and how accurate the cycle is measured. I'm sure you'd rater be installing the xr2 mk-II or getting a new computer!

Blame it on the press, they misuse words. And advertising does so even more!

 

[T.Neo]

Actually I'd be very interested in the life cycle of the fruit fly.

What I don't see is a particularly interesting system to science- we've already found exoplanetary systems with multiple planets (and far more planets than currently discovered in this particular system), so apart from the novelty of it (AFAIK) being the first multi-planet system detected via the transfer method, and ongoing evidence that the telescope is in fact working- as has been shown by the several previous planets detected, it isn't really that special.