New Exoplanet Candidates from Ailing Kepler Spacecraft
June 20, 2013
Kepler space telescope has turned up another 503 potential exoplanets, mission control officials at NASA‘s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, announced recently. This brings to 3,216 the number of planet candidates detected by the orbiting probe since its launch in March 2009. Further investigation has confirmed that 132 of those objects are, in fact, extrasolar planets.
Unfortunately, Kepler’s planet-hunting days may be over. Since mid-May, Kepler has been nonoperational because of an equipment malfunction. At that time, mission controllers discovered that one of the craft’s reaction wheels was not working. These devices keep the craft aimed precisely in the right direction. Kepler, which needs three reaction wheels to operate properly, now has only two. Originally, the telescope carried a spare, but that device was put into service when another of the reaction wheels quit working in 2012.
A planet about the size of Saturn, known as Kepler-35b, orbits a binary star (pair of stars) in an artist's illustration of a planetary system discovered by Kepler.
Kepler’s main mission is to search one section of the Milky Way Galaxy for Earth-like planets in the “habitable zone.” The habitable zone, also called the Goldilocks zone, is the region around a star that scientists believe is neither too hot nor too cold to support life as we know it. In this zone, the temperature is cool enough to let liquid water form and warm enough to prevent water from freezing. Earth orbits in the habitable zone of the solar system. Kepler has searched over 150,000 stars for signs of orbiting planets.
Additional World Book articles:
- Binary star
- Planet
- In Search of Other Worlds (a special report)
- Space exploration (2011) (a Back in Time article)
