On May 12, 2009, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft began hunting for planets outside the solar system. The graphic tells its story by the numbers.
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NASA is bringing together experts spanning a variety of scientific fields for an unprecedented initiative dedicated to the search for life on planets outside our solar system.
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Next time you sip a humble glass of H2O, consider this: The story of water connects each of us to processes that shape our universe.
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Now in its fourth campaign as the K2 mission, the Kepler spacecraft continues to search for exoplanets.
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NASA’s Kepler mission team will receive the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s highest group honor at a ceremony in Washington on March 25.
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Artist’s impression of a hypothetical Earth-like moon around a Saturn-like exoplanet.
A team of 21st-century explorers working for the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) project, based at Harvard University, are searching for exomoons using data from NASA’s Kepler mission and the Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
The discovery of exomoons—moons situated beyond our own solar system—would add to the growing list of celestial objects detected by the Kepler telescope that could potentially harbor life in some form.
In the quest to find the first exomoon, HEK astronomers led by David Kipping at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have devised a unique, systematic computational approach that requires 5.2 million processor hours on Pleiades. Using their in-house LUNA light curve modeling algorithm and a massively parallel sampling algorithm called MultiNest, the project team simulates billions of possible star-planet-moon configurations and compares the results to the actual Kepler data to look for a good match. So far, the team has surveyed 56 of about 400 identified Kepler planet candidates that could have a detectable exomoon.
Surveying the remaining 340 planet candidates would require about 50,000 hours of processing time per object and would take nearly a decade to complete on smaller computers. Utilizing NASA’s powerful Pleiades system—which performs over 3 quadrillion calculations per second—will speed up this computationally expensive process, reducing the processing time to 30,000 hours per object. Over the next two years, the team will survey the remaining candidates for exomoons by performing photo-dynamical analysis of the public data from Kepler, consuming about 10 million processor hours on Pleiades. Their results will be used to determine the occurrence rate of Earth-like moons.
For more information about the HEK Project, visit: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/HEK/index.html
For more information about NASA’s Kepler Mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/
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Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission have discovered a system of five small planets dating back to when the Milky Way Galaxy was a youthful two billion years old.
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Using publicly available data, astronomers may have confirmed K2’s first discovery of star with more than one planet.
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How many stars like our sun host planets like our Earth? NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope continuously monitored more than 150,000 stars beyond our solar system, and to date has offered scientists an assortment of more than 4,000 candidate planets for further study — the 1,000th of which was recently verified.
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In 2014, NASA took significant steps on the agency’s journey to Mars — testing cutting-edge technologies and making scientific discoveries while studying our changing Earth and the infinite universe as the agency made progress on the next generation of air travel.
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