NASA's Kepler spacecraft ready to begin searching for other, cooler "earths"
By Laura June 
posted March 6th 2009 3:50AM
posted March 6th 2009 3:50AM
NASA's just declared its Kepler spacecraft "ready to launch." In case you're not already in the know on this one, the Kepler's mission will be to jaunt out into space, then watch a massive patch of it for 3.5 years to see if there are any signs of habitable planets similar to Earth. The craft will be looking mostly for planets that revolve around stars similar to the Sun, and it will be able to watch about 100,000 of them continuously, unlike the beleaguered but awesome Hubble telescope. The Kepler has a 0.95-meter diameter telescope, and the project has been in the works for about 25 years. It will finally launch tonight, on a Delta 2 rocket. Check out a few images of the Kepler after the break, hit up NASA's Kepler site for the full details of the mission.
[Thanks, Matthew]
[Thanks, Matthew]
@ Patriks7
That would work to...good idea! ^_^ Wipe 'em off the map!
Correct me if I am wrong but as I understand it, this telescope will only work if the planets are passing in front of their star from our point of view, so what about the planets that are on an axis that doesn't cross in front of their star from our point of view, we seem to be cutting out quite a few potential planets.
Let’s say we find 1, but 5 planets that we are 100% sure sustain life. How will we get there? These planets are thousands of light years away. To put it in perspective, one light year is how long it would take traveling at the speed of light. Even if we knew how to travel at these speeds, it would still takes at least a thousand years to the even reach the next closest star. NASA or any high-tech agency still has no answer as to how we can travel at the speed of light. So my question is this: Why spend millions of tax payer’s money on answering a question if we are alone in the universe or not, when we have no reasonable or foreseeable way to actually get to these planets.
To me it just seems that NASA is doing things backwards. Shouldn’t we actually learn how to travel space at the speed of light before we start thinking about alternative planets to discover, consume, destroy and then dispose off? I’m actually pretty sure NASA will find another “earth”, because of this project. Great, because then we can all tune-in our telescopes and wonder how the hell we are going to get there.
Tell NASA, I want my money back.