In Search for Alien Planets, to New Era Will Rise from Kepler's Demise

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In Search for Alien Planets, to New Era Will Rise from Kepler's Demise







The mission of Kepler officially finished on October 30, when NASA announced that the spacecraft had run out of fuel and would receive its last commandments this week or next, but its legacy will extend far beyond the planets it discovered.



	

	That's thanks to two pioneering aspects of the mission, MIT astronomer Sara Seager told Space.com in the form that it destroyed our expectations about What other solar systems would look like, and the way he built the scientific infrastructure to identify planets.

		"Kepler was just a game changer, he was a pioneer for exoplanets," said Seager. "Before Kepler launched, we only knew about hundreds of exoplanets and Kepler found thousands of them and found all kinds of crazy planets."

The[[The 7 biggest discoveries of alien planets from NASA's Kepler spacecraft]





						


Artistic representation of the long-lived Kepler space telescope and some of the planets that it discovered during its almost decade in space.

            						    Credit: NASA 


		Those include many planets that do not have an equivalent here in our familiar solar system: planets orbiting their star in less than a terrestrial day, planets that can be so hot that their surfaces are liquid lava, solar systems with half a dozen planets crowded The equivalent of the space between our sun and the orbit of Mercury.

		"He found so many crazy things we did not expect," Seager said. That is also true at a statistical level, he added. For example, planets two or three times larger than Earth are 10 times more common in Kepler's discoveries than planets such as Jupiter. "We do not even know what these planets are made of, we do not have a counterpart of the solar system," Seager said.

		Seager is the deputy director of science of Kepler's successor, that of NASA. Satellite of exoplanet survey in transit (TESS), which was launched in April and began scientific observations in July. Unlike Kepler's early days, scientists know exactly what to do with the data that TESS sends home every two weeks; Even graduate students can develop the data management procedures they need to confidently identify candidates on the planet now, said Seager.

		"Finding planets with the transit method has become quite standard," he said. "TESS did not have to solve those big problems." Kepler's leg up to TESS is paying off: scientists have already announced two possible planets They have seen in the TESS data.

		But the following steps may not be as easy as the Kepler-TESS transition of dedicated exoplanet missions, Seager concerns. The crucial James Webb Space Telescope, which will allow astronomers to study exoplanet atmospheres, has been delayed a lot, with the launch scheduled for now. 2021 - The year after the completion of the main mission of TESS. 

		The budget of that project and the topics of the timeline. can hinder the next project in the list of scientists, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST is programmed to carry out a technological demonstration of a coronagraph, which will allow astronomers to erase stars and study the discs around them.

The[[7 ways to find alien planets]

		The coronagraph instrument from WFIRST was demoted to a demonstration of technology to reduce costs. "It's not going to revolutionize science, but it will show that it works," Seager said. That will reinforce the case to fly a full-service coronagraph on a future mission.

		But for Seager, Webb's excess costs should teach astronomers a valuable lesson in advancing mission planning: trying to design a project that incorporates everyone's priorities is a recipe for a mission that gets out of control.

		"We made everything easy and cheaper, now we want to make things more difficult, but if you want to do many difficult things and put them all together, you will simply get into trouble," said Seager. "That shared thing now is so complicated, so gigantic and too crazy."



	Email Meghan Bartels in mbartels@space.com or follow it @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom Y Facebook. Original article about Space.com.

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