Originally aired on February 27, 2009, a conversation on the Kepler Mission with Principal Investigator William Borucki, Deputy Principal Investigator David Koch, and Kepler Science Council Member Alan Boss from the Carnegie Institute of Washington.
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For the first time in 99 years, a total solar eclipse will occur across the entire continental United States, and NASA is preparing to share this experience of a lifetime on Aug. 21.
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For the first time in 99 years, a total solar eclipse will occur across the entire continental United States, and NASA is preparing to share this experience of a lifetime on Aug. 21.
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NASA has developed a new system to streamline the way the agency licenses its technology patents, making the transfer of NASA-patented innovations to industry easier than ever before.
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A conversation with Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
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This diagram illustrates how planets are assembled and sorted into two distinct size classes. First, the rocky cores of planets are formed from smaller pieces. Then, the gravity of the planets attracts hydrogen and helium gas. Finally, the planets are “baked” by the starlight and lose some gas.
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This sketch illustrates a family tree of exoplanets. Planets are born out of swirling disks of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks. The disks give rise to giant planets like Jupiter as well as smaller planets mostly between the size of Earth and Neptune.
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Researchers using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory and NASA’s Kepler mission have discovered a gap in the distribution of planet sizes, indicating that most planets discovered by Kepler so far fall into two distinct size classes: the rocky Earth-size and super-Earth-size (similar to Kepler-452b), and the mini-Neptune-size (similar to Kepler-22b
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Kepler was the first NASA mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets, using the transit method, a photometric technique that measures the minuscule dimming of starlight as a planet passes in front of its host star.
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The population of exoplanets detected by the Kepler mission (yellow dots) compared to those detected by other surveys using various methods: radial velocity (light blue dots), transit (pink dots), imaging (green dots), microlensing (dark blue dots), and pulsar timing (red dots).
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