![]() ![]() The mission currently costs about $20 million per year to operate, so that's how much it would cost to keep the mission running the way it does today. If Kepler is extended, exactly how much money the mission would get depends on what NASA wants it to do, Sobeck added. He expects an answer back by April or May. The Kepler team plans to submit its extension proposal to NASA headquarters in January, Sobeck said. Seeing more transits would also increase the signal-to-noise ratio for closer-in planets, allowing more of them to be detected, researchers said. (It would take a hypothetical faraway Kepler a minimum of three years, after all, to see Earth transit the sun three times.) Because of the three-transit requirement, most of the worlds Kepler has found to date zip around their stars relatively quickly, in close-in orbits.īut keeping Kepler going for another few years would give it a chance to look for planets in more distant orbits, allowing the telescope to survey the habitable zones of warmer stars. Giving Kepler more time to search for extrasolar planets could yield big dividends for several reasons, researchers said. But the instrument could operate for six years, or perhaps longer, if it receives more funding, team members have said. When Kepler launched in 2009, the telescope's science mission was set to run through November 2012 - a lifetime of 3.5 years. And it found one solar system (Kepler-11) whose six known planets all orbit closer to their star than Venus does to the sun. Kepler's discoveries have also opened astronomers' eyes to the incredible diversity of alien planets and solar systems.įor example, the mission has detected one world as dense as iron (Kepler-10b) and another as light and airy as Styrofoam (Kepler-7b). Kepler needs to witness three of these transits to firmly identify a planet candidate. The telescope detects the telltale dips in brightness caused when an alien planet crosses in front of, or transits, its star from Kepler's perspective. Kepler finds alien planets using what's called the transit method. Kepler's overall goal is to help scientists determine just how common such planets may be throughout our galaxy. Its mission is to find roughly Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zones of their parent stars - a just-right range of distances that could support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it on the alien worlds. The $600 million Kepler observatory launched in March 2009. It would cost about $20 million per year to keep the Kepler mission running at its current level of activity beyond November 2012, Sobeck added. "So we're hopeful, but there's no guarantee." "I think the discoveries we're making are showing what could be done if we continue to extend it," said Charlie Sobeck, Kepler deputy project manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. ![]()
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