

Kepler space telescope finds 1,091 new exoplanet candidates - MRonney
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-02/29/kepler-data-dump

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cryptoz
Kepler is the most exciting mission that exists anywhere right now. We've
always assumed that there might be lots of Earth-like planets, but here's our
_proof_ that the galaxy is littered with them.

However...

> In Barack Obama's proposed 2013 budget for Nasa, the president would cut
> Kepler's funding from $19.6 million to $13.6 million next year, then cut
> cash to the space telescope entirely from 2014.

Not okay. We need to fix this, asap.

~~~
srl
Here's what I don't understand. How are scientific projects constantly having
funding crises? The set of people who are most interested in seeing Kepler,
JWST, etc. succeed strongly overlaps the set of people who have the sort of
money needed to make these projects be successful without even significantly
impacting their life style.

Asking as a stereotypically poor college student - why do these projects not
have nontrivial amounts of "private" (not for-profit, just "private") funding?

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lutorm
_So what's causing this trend towards smaller, slower stars?

For a telescope in our solar system to see an exoplanet in transit, the
planet's orbit must be lined up edgewise to us. "The probability for an orbit
to be properly aligned is equal to the diameter of the star divided by the
diameter of the orbit," a spokesperson for Nasa, explains. ... Kepler's
looking at thousands of stars, but because big planets are more likely to be
found, they're going to come up early in the data._

They didn't get that quite right. While it's true that the transit probability
is greater for large planets and that we'll find more of them, that doesn't
explain a _fractional_ increase in planets far from the star with time.

It's simpler. Planets far from the star take longer to go around. To confirm a
transit and calculate the period, you need at least two, so the experiment
must have gone on long enough for the planet to go around at least once. The
long-periodicity planets are just beginning to show up because of this.

~~~
warfangle
And we may have to wait even longer for the super long periodicity planets -
for example, Neptune just finished its first orbit since discovery - in 2010.

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fletchowns
There was a lady from SETI on All Things Considered last night talking about
how they are pointing their scopes at some of these planets, pretty cool
stuff!

[http://www.npr.org/2012/02/28/147590627/seti-site-up-
again-a...](http://www.npr.org/2012/02/28/147590627/seti-site-up-again-and-
searching-for-intelligent-life)

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Mrtierne
Needs to be privatized and then we can keep Kepler up and get James Webb
launched.

~~~
ceejayoz
Privatized? What revenue model do you propose for making a profit finding
extrasolar planets?

~~~
splat
To be fair, nearly all ground-based observatories in the US are privately
owned and operated. (Actually, they're almost all owned and operated by those
evil corporations!) Most of the money that funds these observatories
ultimately comes from the federal government, of course, but the fact that
they're privately run gives them a great deal more flexibility than NASA-run
observatories get. Although space-based observatories are generally more
expensive than ground-based observatories, there are privately owned ground-
based observatories being built of comparable size to Kepler.

~~~
lutorm
Those evil corporations, though, are basically non-profits whose sole purpose
is to manage the facilities.

For example: <http://www.aura-astronomy.org/about.asp>

"AURA is a consortium of universities, and educational and other non-profit
institutions, that operates world-class astronomical observatories."

and <http://www.keckobservatory.org/>:

"The Keck Observatory is managed by the California Association for Research in
Astronomy, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization whose board of directors
includes representatives from Caltech and the University of California."

