Five things you need to know about the Kepler space telescope – Newspaper Zócalo

Washington, USA .- NASA announced Tuesday the discovery of 284 thousand new exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, found through the instrument ideal observation which is the Kepler space telescope.

Launched on March 6, 2009 and named after the German mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), this extremely powerful telescope that measures 4.7 meters long and 2.7 wide and weighs just over a ton, looking for planets where, as on Earth, life would be possible.

How does Kepler?

Kepler constantly points to a single group of 150 000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra in the Milky Way. Detects planets by observing a transient decrease in brightness of stars watching. When a planet passes in front of its star as Mercury across the Sun did on Monday, for example, the light coming from the star decreases slightly. Kepler can see even very subtle brightness variations that give information about the presence of a planet. The telescope is so powerful that if pointed toward Earth might notice in a small town, at night, change brightness when someone turns the light on the porch of his house.

Camera larger in space

to stargazing watching photographic, Kepler has a front lens diameter of 1.4 meters, placed in front of digital sensors, similarly to a camera Photo. These sensors coupled together make Kepler expect a sensitive area of ​​95 million pixels, making it the largest camera ever launched into space. These sensors recorded continuously and transmit their enormous amounts of data to NASA scientists on Earth about once a month.

On the verge of catastrophe

The technological marvel that is Kepler has already failed … and twice! The first time, two of the four “wheels” that allow the telescope to point to a particular direction in space stopped working, the first in July 2012, the second in early 2013. Attempts to repair failed, but researchers NASA managed to contain the problem. From this ruling, however, the original mission of the telescope changed, and is no longer pointing to the group of stars watching from the beginning but which campaigns observation under a baptized as “K2″ mission.

last month, a second fault did fear the worst. For the first time, the device was put into “emergency” mode and multiple simultaneous failures reported. It was actually a computer problem that NASA engineers managed to solve. Although not yet know what caused the problem, the telescope works normally again.

What has discovered Kepler so far?

Of the nearly 5,000 potential exoplanets discovered so far, more than 3 000 200 have been confirmed. Among them, 2 000 325 were discovered by Kepler.

In the last batch of data decrypted by NASA, announced on Tuesday that Kepler had identified 4,000 possible planets 302. There are more than 99% chance that 1,284 of them are really exoplanets and a thousand other 327 would probably be, but have not met the criteria of 99% probability and require additional analysis.

The analysis of Kepler they have also validate other 984 exoplanets were observed by other means.

How long life for Kepler?

Launched in 2009, the original mission Kepler was to last three and a half years, with a possible extension for another two years. Since its ruling in 2013, the telescope is used as part of the “K2″ mission, scheduled to last until 2017 or 2018.

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