21 Dec 2007. 2009 to be International Year of Astronomy, UN declares. CBC News. Excerpt: The United Nations on Thursday named 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, to mark the 400th anniversary of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei's first observations using a telescope.
The UN 62nd General Assembly made the proclamation Thursday morning in Paris, after the resolution was submitted by Italy, Galileo's home country.
The International Astronomical Union and UNESCO will jointly run the initiative with 99 nations,
...A number of major international space projects should also be underway that year. NASA is scheduled to launch its Kepler telescope in February, the space agency's first attempt to send a probe into space that will be capable of finding Earth-size and smaller planets around other stars.
The European Space Agency also has plans in 2009 to launch a roving laboratory to Mars. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic service, which plans to offer commercial suborbital space flights, is scheduled to launch that year as well....

15 Nov 2007. Discovering Planets Just Got Easier. By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK, Time-CNN. Excerpt: ...Earlier this month, astronomers from San Francisco State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington announced the discovery of a fifth planet around the star 55 Cancri, which is 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer. ...Like almost all extrasolar planets, the new world is too small and distant to be spotted by telescope. Instead, it was discovered by measuring the tiny wobbles its gravity imposes on the motion of its parent star. That's a slow process, though. It took 18 years of measurements before the presence of the planet could be confirmed. Now an entirely new planet-hunting strategy, centered on a type of star nobody has been looking at, could reveal in as little as a year a habitable, Earthlike planet--and if the scientists get lucky, more than one.
The key is a type of dim red star known as an M-dwarf, only about a hundredth as bright as the sun. During the 1990s, sky surveys revealed that these puny stars are as thick as ants at a picnic, accounting for up to 70% of all the stars in the Milky Way. Because an M-dwarf is so faint, its habitable zone is much smaller, so any planet that falls within that zone would be much closer to it than Earth is to the sun. And that, says Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau, gives planet hunters a huge advantage. "Basically," he says, "it lets us cheat."
Rather than looking for a stellar wobble, Charbonneau and others are watching red dwarfs for signs of their light subtly dimming as an orbiting planet passes in front of them--a sort of mini-eclipse known as a transit. "If an Earth-size planet in an Earthlike orbit passes in front of a star like the sun," he says, "it dims the star by 1 part in 10,000 or even less." Since a habitable planet around an M-dwarf is much closer--about 7 million miles (11 million km) away--the transit lasts significantly longer. And since the star is smaller and dimmer to begin with, the light reduction from one of these mini-eclipses is more like 1 part in 100 ...easy to spot even from a small, ground-based telescope. So Charbonneau is setting up an array of eight 16-in. (40 cm) telescopes on Mount Hopkins, near Tucson, Ariz., and pointing them over and over at the 100 closest M-dwarfs to see if their light dims in a repeating pattern. If it does, he won't have long to wait: a habitable M-dwarf planet would have a "year" only three or four days long, so transits would happen all the time. Things will get even easier in 2009, when NASA launches a satellite called Kepler. Soaring above our planet's murky atmosphere, it could spot Earthlike planets transiting across the faces of stars by the dozen....

14 Oct 2007. Astronomers may be on brink of finding habitable 'second Earth'. Tehran Times. Excerpt: Astronomers may be on the brink of discovering a second Earth-like planet, a find that would add fresh impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life, according to a leading science journal. ...Writing in the U.S. journal Science, astronomers from six major centers, including NASA, Harvard and the University of Colorado, outline how advances in technology suggest scientists are on the verge of being able to detect the presence of small, rocky planets, much like our own, around distant stars for the first time. ...One technique relies on observing the shift in light coming from a star as a planet swings around it. Until recently, this ""radial velocity"" method has only been sensitive enough to pick up planets far more massive than Earth, but improvements now make the discovery of a second Earth highly likely, said Dave Latham, a co-author on the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "It could happen almost any time now. We have the technological capability to identify Earth-like planets around the smallest stars even now," he said. ...Dr. Latham said missions such as Nasa's planned Kepler space observatory, which is due to launch in early 2009, would have a high chance of finding Earth-like planets if they are out there. "These are the biggest questions. Are there habitable abodes? Are we alone?"" he said. ""Put it like this. If we don't find anything, I'll have to rethink my agnosticism."

12 Oct 2007. New Worlds on the Horizon: Earth-Sized Planets Close to Other Stars. by Eric Gaidos, Nader Haghighipour, Eric Agol, David Latham, Sean Raymond, John Rayner. Science: Vol. 318. no. 5848, pp. 210 - 213 DOI: 10.1126/science.1144358. Abstract: The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfills an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Recent advances in instrumentation and new missions are extending searches to planets the size of Earth but closer to their host stars. There are several possible ways such planets could form, and future observations will soon test those theories. Many of these planets we discover may be quite unlike Earth in their surface temperature and composition, but their study will nonetheless inform us about the process of planet formation and the frequency of Earth-like planets around other stars.

25 Sep 2007. Ball Aerospace Completes Primary Mirror and Detector Array Assembly Milestones for Kepler Mission. PRESS RELEASE. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has successfully completed two significant milestones for the Kepler Mission: the precision coating process of Kepler's primary mirror, and the integration of the detector array assembly. These milestones meet a critical path requirement and allow the program to begin integration and test on the photometer telescope and focal plane array assembly.
"These milestones allow the Kepler mission to enter the next phase of development and demonstrate Ball Aerospace's intent to successfully move the program forward," said Cary Ludtke, Vice President and General Manager for Ball's Civil and Operational Space business unit.
The Kepler instrument is a custom-built, 0.95-meter aperture Schmidt telescope, with a 1.4-meter primary mirror, and an array of 46 charge coupled devices (CCDs) at the focus. It features a focal plane array of 95 megapixels that will measure the brightness of 100,000 stars every 30 minutes in a search for Earth-size planets around stars in our galaxy.
Coating the primary mirror culminates a four-year development program to design and build a large, light-weight mirror for use in space. The enhanced, silver coating technology used for the primary mirror was provided by Surface Optics Corporation and is designed to provide the NASA mission with the sensitivity needed to detect planets as they pass in front of stars. With the primary mirror complete, integration of the telescope using the 0.95 m Schmidt corrector and composite housing is now underway. The advanced integration and functional testing of the Ball-designed and manufactured CCD Detector Module array and detector electronics were completed at Ball's Detector Technology Center, opened in 2006.
Ball Aerospace is also building the spacecraft for the Kepler mission, which is scheduled to launch in February, 2009....

25 Sep 2007. Cornucopia Of Earth-sized Planets Modeled By NASA. Science Daily — Excerpt: In the Star Wars movies fictional planets are covered with forests, oceans, deserts, and volcanoes. But new models from a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists begin to describe an even wider range of Earth-size planets that astronomers might actually be able to find in the near future. ...Sara Seager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.; Marc Kuchner, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; Catherine Hier-Majumder, Carnegie Institution of Washington, (deceased); and Burkhard Militzer, Carnegie, have created models for 14 different types of solid planets that might exist in our galaxy.
The 14 types have various compositions, and the team calculated how large each planet would be for a given mass. Some are pure water ice, carbon, iron, silicate, carbon monoxide, and silicon carbide; others are mixtures of these various compounds.
"We’re thinking seriously about the different kinds of roughly Earth-size planets that might be out there, like George Lucas, but for real," says Kuchner.
..."We have learned that extrasolar giant planets often differ tremendously from the worlds in our solar system, so we let our imaginations run wild and tried to cover all the bases with our models of smaller planets," says Kuchner. ...The team calculated how gravity would compress planets of varying compositions. The resulting computer models predict a planet’s diameter for a given composition and mass. For example, a 1-Earth-mass planet made of pure water will be about 9,500 miles across, whereas an iron planet with the same mass will be only about 3,000 miles in diameter. For comparison, Earth, which is made mostly of silicates, is 7,926 miles across at its equator.
...The team hopes that these models will yield insights into planet compositions when astronomers start finding Earth-sized planets around other stars. Missions such as the French Corot satellite, which launched on December 27, 2006, and NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, scheduled to launch in 2009, can find planets not much larger than Earth by watching them pass in front of their host stars, events known as transits. The transits yield the planet’s size, and follow-up studies can measure the mass. By comparing a planet's size and mass, astronomers might be able to determine whether it is mostly water ice or mostly iron, for example.
But astronomers using the transit method will find it difficult at best to distinguish a silicate planet from a carbon planet, because they’re about the same size for a given mass. "To make this finer distinction, we will need some help from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope or Terrestrial Planet Finder," says Kuchner....

3 Aug 2007. In a Strange Universe, We Stick to Search For Familiar Life. By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, Wall Street Journal, SCIENCE JOURNAL. Excerpt: In this universe, life is not just stranger than we know. It may be stranger than we can imagine. Would we recognize it, if we ever did chance upon alien life? ...Using NASA's $720 million Spitzer Space Telescope, astrophysicist Giovanna Tinetti and her colleagues at the European Space Agency in Paris detected water molecules on a planet 370 trillion miles away, they reported recently in Nature. This world, known only as HD 189733b, orbits a cool, dim star in the constellation Vulpecula, a stellar landmark so remote that its light takes about 64 years to reach us. In the atmosphere of this giant planet, water may exist only as steam in boiling skies. ..."Our discovery shows that water might be more common out there than previously thought," said Dr. Tinetti. "I hope we can find water on planets less hostile." Water, crucial for the origin of life on Earth, has animated NASA's search for life-forms on other worlds for decades. Probes have detected oceans of slush on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and active geysers on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. ...To detect water 64 light years away, Dr. Tinetti and her team used the Spitzer Telescope to measure tiny variations in wavelengths of infrared light as the planet orbited in front of its star and eclipsed it. "You stare at the planet, watch the dip in light and measure it," said Sean Casey at Caltech's Spitzer Science Center in Pasadena, Calif. They saw that for each wavelength, a different amount of light was absorbed by the planet. The pattern matches that of water molecules. ...In 2009, NASA plans to launch a $550 million space telescope, called Kepler, capable of finding smaller Earth-size planets....

25 July 2007. New worlds no longer so alien - Technology helps scientists rapidly detect exoplanets. BY ROBERT S. BOYD, MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- It's boom time for planet hunters. Astronomers are bagging new worlds at an average rate of more than two a month. As of Friday, the latest available date, 246 extrasolar planets had been detected circling other stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Among them are 25 alien solar systems consisting of two, three or four bodies orbiting single suns. ...In early 2009, NASA is to launch a more powerful telescope, named Kepler, that will monitor 100,000 stars in the northern sky for four years. Kepler will have "enough precision to find Earth-size planets," said William Borucki, a space scientist at NASA's Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. Borucki said he hoped to find 50 Earthlike planets and 500 objects twice as massive.

24 July 2007. Scientists indulge in planetary bounty--Hundreds of new bodies found 'almost weekly' - By Robert S. Boyd - McClatchy Newspapers. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- It's boom time for planet hunters. Astronomers are bagging new worlds at a average rate of more than two a month. As of July 20, the latest available date, 246 extrasolar planets had been detected circling other stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Among them are 25 alien "solar systems" consisting of two, three or four bodies orbiting single suns. Four new exoplanets, as they're also called, were reported just this month, three were reported in May and 28 during the past 12 months. The smallest known exoplanet, only twice as wide and five times heavier than Earth, was revealed in April. "Ten years ago, we knew of no extrasolar planets," said John Bally, an astronomer at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "Now we're discovering planets almost weekly."
...A European planet-hunting satellite, named Corot, was launched last December and reported its first discovery May 3. In early 2009, NASA will launch a more powerful telescope, named Kepler, that will monitor 100,000 stars in the northern sky for four years. Kepler will have "enough precision to find Earth-size planets," said William Borucki, a space scientist at NASA's Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. Borucki said he hoped to find 50 Earthlike planets and 500 objects twice as massive by a relatively new technique known as "transit photometry." This method measures the tiny dip in a star's light as a planet passes in front of it as seen from Earth. Borucki compared it to detecting "a gnat flying across a headlight." So far, 21 planets have been found this way....

16 July 2007. Kepler Team Cuts Costs, Avoids Cancellation. By BRIAN BERGER, Space News Staff Writer. Excerpt: Threatened with cancellation, the team building NASA's Kepler planet-hunting telescope found a way get the spacecraft to the launch pad by early 2009 without a new infusion of cash. ...The price tag for the Discovery-class mission has risen several times since its 2001 selection ... pushing the total cost of the mission above $550 million. ...This spring, the Kepler team - which consists of Ball Aerospace & Technology, Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) - told NASA science chief Alan Stern it needed an additional $42 million and an extra four months to finish the spacecraft. "My response was 'no, [the Science Mission Directorate] no longer manages by open checkbook. You need to find a way to get it back in the box because I don't have $42 million in the astrophysics program anyway,'" Stern recalled in a July 9 interview.
Stern told the team to come back in June with a plan for getting the job done within the revised budget NASA approved for Kepler last year. ...On July 6, the Kepler team returned to NASA headquarters ... proposed staying within the budget NASA approved in 2006, by cutting six months off the end of the four-year mission, scaling back some spacecraft testing, reducing schedule reserve and making some management changes. ...Ball Aerospace & Technologies, the Boulder, Colo.-based firm building the spacecraft and instrument, gave up "millions and millions of dollars of their earned fee," Stern said. The plan passed muster with Stern and the other NASA officials. ...Kepler will still miss its November 2008 launch target by two or three months, but Stern said he could live with that....

8 July 2007. Where we're headed. By Neil DeGrasse Tyson for USA Weekend magazine. ...Kepler will be the first NASA mission of its kind, designed to discover planets that are the size of Earth orbiting distant stars. Kepler will need to monitor thousands of stars at once to ensure the best chances of catching a planet within its sights. Think about the possibilities -- that Earth and its solar system may be one of dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions of others. So far, planet hunters have discovered nearly 250 planets beyond our solar system, but almost all of them are giant masses of gas, like Jupiter. Kepler's mission is to find terrestrial planets that may be habitable, like Earth.

4 June 2007. Space mission to ask: anybody out there? By Katy Human, Denver Post Staff Writer. Excerpt: ...Boulder engineers are building NASA's next-generation planet hunter: a $559 million space observatory that will search 170,000 stars for Earthlike planets - places that might harbor life as we know it. "We'll look for habitable planets, places where liquid water can exist on an Earth-sized planet," said Monte Henderson, Kepler project manager at Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder.
...Kepler, based on the same hardware as Deep Impact, is scheduled to launch in November 2008 and will orbit the Sun in a path similar to Earth's.
After three years of delay and a $250 million increase in project costs, engineers are assembling the bus-sized spacecraft in a sophisticated east Boulder warehouse.
The cost overrun is regrettable, said William Borucki, NASA's lead on the Kepler mission, "but when you're trying to do something no one has ever done before, this is what you have to expect."
Kepler's optics rely on the biggest lens sent into space, Borucki said, a massive 55-inch mirror fronted by a square-foot "corrector" of pure sapphire. The spacebound observatory cannot waver as it stares at the same region of space for four years, Borucki said. A blinklike blip, and Kepler might miss the tiny dimming of starlight as an Earthlike planet zips across the face of its star.
...Last month, European scientists announced they had discovered a rocky planet, small and warm enough that it might have water. That "lucky" discovery was made with a ground-based telescope pointed at a single star using the wobble method, Borucki said.
...At Ball last week, a team of engineers paused before pushing a giant component of the Kepler spacecraft into a dust-free assembly room. "There's few opportunities in life to do something that people are going to reflect on as a major point in history," said Ball engineer Brian Carter. "That's what we're doing."

31 May 2007. The planet hunters. From The Economist print edition.
Excerpt: The search for alien life is yielding weird new worlds at a remarkable rate. ...In any new field of endeavour, the first priority is to gather lots of specimens. In planetary science the result is a menagerie of exotic new worlds, some 236 of which were this week confirmed as exoplanets...The main rivals in the exoplanet race are a team led by Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, and another led by Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva. Overall, the Americans have detected more planets, clocking them up at an impressive rate of three a month for the past year. ... a European spacecraft called COROT that was launched in December 2006. It is searching for exoplanets that transit their parent stars, as seen from 900km above Earth. The mission's designers believe that the camera aboard COROT is sensitive enough to detect not merely transiting gas giants, but also rocky planets that are the size of Earth. The spacecraft is also probing the interiors of stars by studying starquakes on their surfaces—in much the same way that geologists learn about the Earth's interior by studying earthquakes. ...America's space agency, NASA, also has plans to launch a dedicated rocky-planet hunter. The Kepler mission is similar to COROT, but will be more sensitive. Moreover, it will be placed in an orbit better suited to locating its quarry. The European mission is hampered by its low orbit: the Earth, the moon and the sun periodically obscure its view. Kepler will not suffer that indignity, because it will be placed in orbit around the sun, trailing behind the Earth. If all goes well, the spacecraft should be launched early in 2009....

30 May 2007. Ball Aerospace Completes Schmidt Corrector Optic Bonding for Kepler. PRNewswire. Excerpt: BOULDER, CO. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has successfully completed the critical milestone of bonding the Schmidt Corrector optic to its mounting ring for the Kepler Mission. Ball is building both the photometer and spacecraft for the Kepler mission, and will manage system integration and testing. Kepler is NASA's first mission capable of finding Earth-size and smaller planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars. (PRNewsFoto/Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.) Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070530/LAW113

29 May 2007. Red dwarfs could harbour life. Planets around commonest stars in our Galaxy might be warm and safe. by Geoff Brumfiel, nature.com. Excerpt: ESO The most common type of star in the Galaxy may be more hospitable to life than was previously believed, say astronomers who have calculated how much radiation planets orbiting such stars would receive. Red dwarfs — cool, low-mass stars — make up more than 75% of the stars in the Milky Way. So far, ten planets have been found around red dwarfs, including one announced on 24 April that appears to be on the edge of a 'habitable zone', the region around a star thought to be capable of supporting life. Many astronomers are sceptical that life could survive around red dwarfs. ..."It's not as bad a place as people thought," says Alan Boss, a theorist with the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. Because red dwarfs are common throughout the Galaxy, Boss believes that future missions, such as NASA's Kepler satellite, scheduled for launch next year, may be able to spot the eclipse of Earth-sized planets around such a star....

29 May 2007. Forecasting Earth-Like Worlds. by Astrobiology Magazine. Excerpt: Paris, France (SPX). Missions like COROT, KEPLER, and DARWIN mean we should know much more about the abundance of Earth-like exoplanets in the coming decades. Franck Selsis, an astrophysicist specializing in planetary atmospheres, discusses the characteristics of atmospheres that can reveal the presence of life, but is realistic about what data from these first missions can reveal. ...COROT, the first space telescope capable of detecting rocky planets around other stars, is already in orbit. The KEPLER and DARWIN missions are set to follow in the next two decades. In this interview with Astrobiology Magazine, Franck Selsis - planetary atmosphere specialist - discusses the characteristics of atmospheres that can reveal the presence of life and what data from these missions is likely to reveal about the abundance of Earth-like planets....
Astrobiology Magazine (AM): What will be the next space missions related to the discovery of Earth-like planets?
FS: The first mission that will unveil evidence of Earth-like planets is called COROT, which is a French and European mission. Then there's a mission called KEPLER by NASA. These missions won't be able to tell us much about the planets, but they will be able to detect them; to count them and to know the abundance of planets resembling the Earth in our galaxy. That will be a huge step in understanding the formation of planets like the Earth....

29 May 2007. Possible habitable planet discovered: Extending the horizons of humanity. By Rob Stevens. World Socialist Website. Excerpt: A team of Swiss, French and Portuguese astronomers announced on April 24 the discovery of an “exoplanet” known as Gliese 581 c. ...The team have published their findings in a paper entitled “The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets: XI. An habitable super-Earth (5 MEarth) in a 3-planet system.” The paper is due to be published shortly in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. It can be downloaded at: http://obswww.unige.ch/~udry/udry_preprint.pdf
The discovery is the most important yet in the rapidly developing field of exoplanetary science. Gliese 581 c appears to be the first exoplanet discovered in what is termed a habitable zone surrounding its parent star (Gliese 581). ...Gliese 581 c has been termed a “super-Earth” due to its radius being 50 percent larger, and its mass about five times greater, than that of the Earth. With an orbital period or “year” of 13 Earth days, it is the smallest Earth-sized exoplanet to be discovered. ...Gliese 581 c was discovered using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph. The spectrograph is located on the 3.6-m telescope at La Silla, Chile, and is controlled by the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO).
The HARPS spectrograph is dedicated to the discovery of extrasolar planets. It is incredibly accurate and is able to measure velocities with a precision better than one metre per second (or 3.6 km/h). ...The search for planets and signs of extra-terrestrial life is to be accelerated over the next few years. On December 26 the Convection, Rotation & planetary Transits (COROT) space mission was launched ...COROT discovered its first exoplanet, a hot Jupiter type, in May.
Another important mission is the NASA Kepler mission. Set to launch in 2008, ...Kepler is “specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to detect and characterize hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone.”
NASA expects to find about 50 planets orbiting their parent star, which will have an orbit of about one year and are about the same size as the Earth. The organisation says of the Kepler mission, “In order to detect many planets one can not just look at a few stars for transits or even a few hundred. One must look at thousands of stars, even if Earth-like planets are common. If they are rare, then one needs to look at many thousands to find even a few. Kepler looks at 100,000 stars so that if Earths are rare, a null or near null result would still be significant. If Earth-size planets are common then Kepler should detect hundreds of them.”

28 April 2007. Scientists will look for alien life, but Where and How? By William Atkins, IT Wire. Excerpt: With the discovery of the potentially habitable planet Gliese 581 c, astrobiologists are setting their sights on the search for extraterrestrial life. Where are the best places to look? What are the best instruments to perform those searches? How will they do it? ... More information about this Earth-like exoplanet [Gliese 581 c] is found at the ITwire article “Earth-like planet found around star Gliese 581, 20.5 LYs away” at http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11577/1066/. [See also ESO press release, and Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site.]

...The French Space Agency launched the COROT (COvection Rotation and planetary Transits) mission on December 27, 2006 with a Soyuz rocket. It is currently looking for large extrasolar planets. Read more about COROT from Itwire article “Exoplanet Search Begins with French Launch of Corot Telescope Satellite” at http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/8299/1066/.
The Kepler mission, scheduled to be launched in November 2008, was developed by NASA to search for extrasolar planets over a four-year period. The space observatory will concentrate on periodic transits of possible planets in front of about 100,000 stars to detect a variable brightness in the stars. Kepler will look for Earth-sized and smaller planets. The Kepler mission will be placed in an Earth-trailing orbit about the Sun. It will have a mass of about 2,290 pounds (1,039 kilograms), an aperture of 3.11 feet (0.95 meters), and a primary mirror of 4.59 feet (1.4 meter)....

24 April 2007. Small planet may be able to support life, astronomers say. By Robert S. Boyd, McClatchy Washington Bureau. Excerpt: ... In a significant advance in the search for extraterrestrial life, European astronomers have discovered what they say may be the first habitable planet [Gliese 581c] orbiting a nearby [red dwarf] star [20 LY away]. They described their find as an Earthlike rocky planet that's small enough and warm enough that it might have liquid water, a necessary condition for life, on its surface. With an estimated radius only 50 percent larger than Earth's, the new planet would be the smallest of about 200 such bodies that have been detected so far outside the solar system. It weighs about five times as much as Earth, apparently the lowest mass of any other known planet. NASA scientists, however, cautioned that determining the size and weight of distant planets is an uncertain art. "It might be the smallest planet around a normal star, but they cannot be sure," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. Red dwarfs are the most common type of stars in the universe. "The fact that it (the new planet) could have liquid water makes it even more fascinating and arguably the first habitable planet," said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius (32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit), and water would thus be liquid," Stephane Udry, an astronomer at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, wrote in a paper to be published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. ...NASA plans to launch ... a mission next year, named Kepler, to scour the skies for Earthlike planets. "Kepler will monitor 100,000 stars for four years with enough precision to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone," said William Borucki, a space scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center. Astronomers define a "habitable zone" as one that's not too hot or too cold, and not too near its star to permit life....

12 April 2007. Kepler telescope primed to search for earth-like planets. By Austin Modine for the Register in Mountain View. Excerpt: Wake me up when you find the space dames. ...NASA has a lot of ground to cover in its search for alien life. The agency made some progress recently by successfully demonstrating in the laboratory the technology behind its next space telescope designed to find planets similar to home sweet home. A panel of NASA scientists shared the news today at a press meeting at the SETI Institute in Mountain View. Scientists currently have a census of over 200 Jupiter-sized planets orbiting near stars, but no real idea how common Earth-size planets are. NASA Ames's Jack Lissauer explains the focus on the big boys isn't because gas giants are the most common but because they're most easily detectable with today's equipment. "It would be like looking from a distance at a street light at night and concluding most of the insects in the area are moths. There could be far more gnats flying around but you couldn't know." ...Kepler's secret sauce is its ability to watch a large piece of infinity at once. The space telescope will scan the same plot of cosmic real-estate with around 100,000 stars for four years. The Kepler team hopes the results will justify further funding to extend the time to six years. Although most working on the Kepler project hope to find several Earth-like planets, there's certainly no guarantee. "One of the most interesting things we could find is zero," NASA scientist William Boruki said. "That could mean we are alone in the universe." ...Just don't piss off any Cylons. Okay guys? ®

2 Apr 2007. Is There Life Out There? By Gordon Kembley, Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone). Excerpt: ...Astronomers are generally agreed on the probability of life in outer space. Renowned astronomers such as Bill Cochran of the University of Texas in the United States argue that Earth is merely a planet around what is a very common, boring star - the Sun - and that there are literally millions of other Suns as centres of other galaxies. They argue that there may be an Earth like planet with life on it, around at least one of those millions of other stars. When discoveries of Jupiter and Saturn-like planets around faraway stars like our Sun were discovered recently, Cochran argued that the discovery was a step in answering the question, "Is there life out there?" So intriguing is the subject of the probability of life beyond our solar system that countries are spending billions of Pula on missions to investigate. NASA, working with Cochran, has launched the Kepler Mission - it's first-ever - capable of finding Earth-size but smaller planets around other stars Kepler roams the heavens as a sky spy, taking images in the constellation of Cygnus, an enormous area in the Milky Way that many night-time stargazers know as the Northern Cross.
..."Just the mere existence of life out there - whether it's advanced, 'intelligent' life or otherwise - is of tremendous importance," says Cochran. "Also, if there isn't life out there, it's almost frightening. If we here represent the only life that exists in our galaxy, you have to ask why. Why is this place special? What's so special about it? Either way, you've opened up issues well beyond science and ventured into philosophy, religion and so on."
Religion does not dismiss the possibility of life elsewhere. ...says Reverend Jonathan Larson... "The Scriptures do not preclude the possibility of life beyond Earth, but we should be careful that our thinking that there may be life elsewhere does not devalue the uniqueness, the preciousness that we have here. We must continually see our Earth as the precious planet that it is," says Larson.
...Pastor Ronald Phetlhe of Christ Citadel International shares Larson's sentiments: "... There are probably other planets with life; each one of them probably has a volume of on the Creation and the Thereafter. ...God has only revealed to us what we have in our volume.
...Subramanian, a priest of the Gaborone Hindu Temple, casts another view: "As Hindus, we believe that there could be life outside Earth. It is only that we do not have concrete proof. We believe in Heaven as another of the galaxies whose vastness suggests there could be life up there." Says James Amanze of the Theology department at the University of Botswana: "As theologians, we believe that Creation is a process. God is not done. Even as we talk, He is busy creating. So, the question of whether there might be life on other planets is not farfetched".

7 March 2007. Dr. Janice Voss (NASA Ames Research Center): "A Scientist in Space" and "Searching for Earth-like Planets: NASA's Kepler Mission" PODCAST - The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures. Dr. Voss, who has logged 49 days in space (traveling almost 19 million miles in 779 Earth orbits) discusses her work in space and what it's like flying on the Shuttle as a scientist. She then talks about NASA's upcoming Kepler mission, which will use a telescope in space to search for "transits" -- when a planet orbiting another star moves in front of its star and blocks its light. Although a planet might only block a tiny fraction of the light from a star, that decrease in brightness is enough to give a clear signal that the planet is there. With this mission, scientists hope to be able to find not only Jupiter and Saturn-sized planets, but also those as small as Earth. At the end, Dr. Voss answers a number of audience questions about both aspects of her work.

7 February 2007. The Kepler Mission: The Search for Earth-like Planets. Space.com - Excerpt: BOULDER, Colorado – The hunt for Earth-like worlds orbiting distant suns will get a big boost next year with the liftoff of NASA’s Kepler mission. That spacecraft’s job is to monitor 100,000 stars in a stellar staring contest intended to detect periodic decreases in a star’s brightness—a falloff of light due to planets transiting their parent stars.
Kepler’s pursuit of rocky Earth-sized planets is a step forward in taking on some tough but major questions, such as: Are terrestrial planets common or rare? What are their sizes and distances?
What’s more, how often are such worlds detected in the habitable zone—the region around a star where liquid water should be available on a planet, perhaps making it a homely place for life?
Kepler is a trailblazer for other innovative searches for terrestrial planets. Future plans of planet hunting researchers were detailed here January 26-28 at a media workshop sponsored by the University of Colorado’s Center for Astrobiology....
In essence, Kepler is part digital camera on steroids and part light meter. ...Borucki reported that Kepler should detect numbers of terrestrial plants, many of them expected to be within the habitable zone—if they are common. A null result would mean Earths in the habitable zone are rare in our galaxy.
“Ultimately”, Borucki observed, “what we’re asking is…what is the place of mankind in the universe? This is the first part of that answer…a step.”
Of course, even if Kepler discovers that these planets are rare, it would provide valuable insight about the origin of our Earth.
However, that notion doesn’t sit well with Borucki. “If we don’t find them we can’t have Star Trek because they’ll be nowhere to go.”

29 January 2007. Spacecraft will hunt for planets. By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News. Excerpt: BOULDER - William Borucki wasn't sure he'd live to see his dream mission, the planet-hunting Kepler telescope, make it into space. The planetary scientist's proposal was rejected four times by NASA. Then other delays and budget cuts threatened to scuttle the $500 million effort before it reached the launch pad.
But persistence is paying off for Borucki, 68. The Kepler space telescope is under construction at Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder, with launch set for November 2008.
Borucki said Sunday he persevered because the question Kepler will answer is just too important to be ignored or deferred. "Ultimately, what we're asking is, 'What's the place of mankind in the universe?' " he said at a workshop hosted by the NASA-funded Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado.
"The question of whether there are other habitable planets out there, and how frequent they are, is a first step in understanding the extent of life in the universe," said Borucki, who works at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. ...If Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are common, Kepler may find 50 or 60 of them during its four-year mission. If they're rare, Kepler may not find any.
But even a goose egg would be a monumental result, Borucki said. "If we find a lot in the habitable zone, life is probably ubiquitous," he said. "If we find zero, then we're probably alone." ...Kepler will be the first mission capable of detecting the slight dimming of an Earth- size planet passing in front of its star, said Jack Lissauer of Ames, a member of the Kepler team. The amount of dimming caused by the transit of an Earth-size planet is comparable to a gnat flying in front of the car headlight, said Edna De Vore of California's SETI Institute. ...Engineers at Boulder's Ball Aerospace then faced ... formidable challenges, said Monte Henderson, the company's program manager for Kepler. The first was to create an ultra-stable telescope that could lock onto the same spot in space for four straight years. "This is a staring mission," Henderson said. "The stability requirements on Kepler are far beyond anything that exists today, so we are developing a new stability and guidance system that doesn't exist anywhere in the world."...

2 Jan 2007. e2v Image Sensors Search For Earth-Like Planets — Photonics Online. Excerpt: With imaging sensors designed and manufactured by e2v, the COROT space telescope launched on December 27 to examine star seismology and to search for extra-solar Earth-like planets. The e2v sensors will capture detailed, telescopic images from COROT as it travels its polar orbit around the Earth. ...Four back-thinned, frame transfer charge coupled imaging devices (CCDs) from e2v - CCD42-80s - have been integrated into COROT’s focal plane, which will capture images of stars, with two main objectives:

• Firstly, a scientific study of the stars’ seismic activity will be carried out. The 2,048 square pixel e2v devices will help COROT to examine ‘star-quakes’ or vibrations that change the brightness of stars. This will enable scientists to compute a star’s age, size, and chemical makeup.
• Secondly, COROT will search for indications of extra-solar habitable planets. The e2v imaging devices will detect the planets as they cross the discs of their parent stars, causing a dip in the brightness of the parent star, just as an eclipse of the sun darkens the Earth. However, COROT will be looking for events millions of times weaker than our familiar solar eclipse.

To achieve the degree of sensitivity required, the e2v sensors will operate in very cold temperatures in the depths of space, sensing light in the visible waveband. The e2v sensors were selected for their very high and stable quantum efficiency (sensitivity), low dark signal and low readout noise, characteristics crucial to the success of the programme. They were delivered in highly flat, geometrically stable packaging suited to the harsh space environment.
Dr. Ralph Holtom, e2v Aerospace Imaging Business Manager, commented: ”... Other missions like NASA’s Kepler and ESA’s Gaia will follow using e2v’s CCDs, which will add more and more to our knowledge of other planets. This really is the start of a new phase of our exploration of space.” ....