Latest Johannes Kepler Stories

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will hold a media briefing on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 2 p.m. EDT, to discuss early science results of the Kepler mission. Kepler is the first spacecraft with the ability to find Earth-size planets orbiting stars like our sun in a zone where liquid water could exist. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The televised briefing will be held in the James E. Webb Memorial Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. S.W.,...

NASA will hold a media briefing on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 2 p.m. EDT, to discuss early science results of the Kepler mission. Kepler is the first spacecraft with the ability to find Earth-size planets orbiting stars like our sun in a zone where liquid water could exist.The televised briefing will be held in the James E. Webb Memorial Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. S.W., Washington.The briefing participants are:-- Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics Division director, NASA Headquarters--...

The European Space Agency's (ESA) next space freighter is slowly being assembled for a November 2010 launch, BBC News reported.Nico Dettmann, who is in charge of producing the follow-up ship to the current Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) - dubbed Johannes Kepler, knows the near-flawless maiden voyage of the last model does not mean the second flight is guaranteed to turn out the same way. "It's clear from space history that often it was not the prototype that experienced the problems;...

Future generations of humans living in space are likely to be fat, short, ugly, bloated and bald, researchers at London's University College said. Traveling to earth's closest stars would require years, if not decades, in space, and such long-distance travel would take its toll on the human body, Dr. Lewis Dartnell, a university astrobiologist, told The Daily Telegraph in a story published Friday. Near zero gravity would leave bodies stunted with underdeveloped muscles and bones, while fluid...

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans."Now the fun begins," said William Borucki, Kepler science principal...

Astronomers have announced plans to build an ultra-stable, high-precision spectrograph for the Science and Technology Facilities Council's 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT - part of the Isaac Newton Group or ING on La Palma) in an effort to discover habitable Earth-like planets around other stars. Dr Ian Skillen of the ING will present the new High Accuracy Radial-velocity Planet Search "“ New Earths Facility (HARPS-NEF) spectrograph in a poster on Monday 20th April at the European...

NASA's Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth.The new "first light" images show the mission's target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy. One image shows millions of stars in Kepler's full field of view, while two others zoom in on portions of the larger region. The images can be seen online...

The underground economy in Europe is likely to grow this year while the mainstream economies falter, an Austrian economist said. Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, said the so-called shadow economy which relies on cash deals to avoid taxes, would grow up to 0.9 percent in Ireland, Britain and Spain this year, the EU Observer reported Tuesday. The shadow economy ranges in size from 10 percent of the official gross domestic product in Scandinavia and...

Engineers have successfully ejected the dust cover from NASA's Kepler telescope, a spaceborne mission soon to begin searching for worlds like Earth."The cover released and flew away exactly as we designed it to do," said Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This is a critical step toward answering a question that has come down to us across 100 generations of human history -- are there other planets like Earth, or are we...

Kepler is now more than 1 million kilometers (620,000 miles) from Earth, drifting away at the rate of about 1 kilometer per second. The past few days have been spent collecting data from the focal-plane array on Kepler's science instrument, the photometer, at various sun angles and temperatures as part of the calibration process. The focal-plane array, which contains 42 charge-coupled devices like those in your digital camera, is where light from the telescope is focused.Each data set is sent...