Kepler Telescope: The largest planetary hunter of all time

NASA’s most important tasks to search for planets outside our solar system, Kepler Space Telescope, has discovered 2,662 worlds during its nine and a half years of event. More than the discoveries themselves, the great heritage of the observatory It turned out that there were more planets than the stars in our galaxy.

Before the launch, in March 2009, many scientists believed that planetary systems like our solar system were rare in the universe. Just like German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, the current Kepler (now retired) reorganized our understanding of the functioning of the universe and paved the way for future research.

The space telescope was the first telescope to use the so -called traffic method on a large scale of observing the humidity of the stars when the planets passed in front of the planets. Before the release of Kepler, less than 20 outer planets were discovered by this method.

Long pregnancy of Kepler space telescope

It is more difficult to discover a planet in Galaxy Ends, finding money to sponsor a scientific discovery trip. And this was no different with Kepler. Creator former NASA Apollo scientist William Boruuckki, observing his transitions, began to look for resources for a task to investigate current planets.

Although it has been known since 1952, the method created by Ukrainian scientist Otto Struve has not yet been proven in practice (only in 1999). For this reason, the US space agency rejected Boruucki’s idea four times. It was accepted as technologically and financially possible and even crazy.

The Kepler team had to prove their feasibility to overcome the resistance of the project approvers. This was done in an experiment designed by scientist and engineer David Koch. He set up a device that simulates a star and a planet as transit. To do this, the team used a star to represent the planet and a stable light source representing a small, dark object. The NASA mission approved the mission in 2001.

Kepler mission planning

Planet hunting, the same star demanded to detect more than one light. Therefore, the telescope had to adopt a regular orbit. And in the orbit of the Earth, such as Hubble, Kepler followed a certain heliosentric orbit that allowed him to constantly observe the same region as paradise. The selected target was Cygnus (Swan) near Lyra. A region with high star density.

Another obstacle to overcome it was to ensure that all researchers in this world have unlimited access to task data. Surprisingly, the access hierarchy, as well as delaying the project, allows many people to overload, while others had nothing to do. Astrophysicist Jason Steffen, who was involved in the task a year before the launch, determined that teleconferences would be open to everyone.

Naturally, as in any planning. There were unexpected challenges, and one of them was very important, the sharpness of images that seemed a bit blurry in the first tests. Adjusting the focus can improve the detection of smaller planets, but may endanger the task. So he chose not to adjust the team focus.

How was Kepler’s mission?

Finally, it was started in 2009 at a cost of $ 600 million, Kepler telescope was expected to work for only one year. Initially, the task eliminates false positives, as the darkness of the stars may arise for reasons other than planetary transitions. For this reason, astronomers used additional telescopes to measure gravitational release of candidate outer planets.

To accelerate this process, Kepler began to adopt statistical methods. In 2014, the “Multiplication” technique allowed you to approve 715 planets at the same time. In 2013, however, the error of the two reaction wheels endangered the accuracy of the telescope. NASA moved on time and renewed the task by creating the K2 project using the sun wind pressure to maintain telescope stability.

Although less discovered, the K2 mission was able to reveal hundreds of external planets. In 2016, NASA announced more than 100 planets found by K2. Between 2016 and 2017, Kepler examined the trappist-1 system, which contains several soil-sized planets. In 2018, a new data set revealed 95 additional planets in the orbit of a bright star that facilitates future observations like TESS, which continues its heritage.

On October 30, 2018, the Kepler space telescope officially retired and an inert satellite remained in the orbit of the sun. Next time.