In a timed exposure, spectators watch from Cocoa Beach as the Kepler satellite launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. March 6.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday on a three-year mission to find Earth’s twin, a Goldilocks planet where it’s neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold.

The Delta II rocket, carrying the widest-field telescope ever put in space, lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time.

The $590-million Kepler mission is jointly managed by JPL and NASA’s Ames Research Center in the Bay Area. The spacecraft carries a 15-foot-long telescope with a 55-inch mirror that can scrutinize a wide star field for the telltale dimming of starlight that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, known as a transit.

Over the last decade, scientists have employed the same technique with ground-based telescopes to discover 340 planets circling other stars. But because the optics of ground-based instruments are compromised by atmospheric interference, most of the planets found so far are Jupiter-like gas giants that orbit so close to their parent stars that any life forms would be incinerated.

The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, whose optics are not hampered by Earth’s atmosphere, was designed to see deeply but very narrowly.

Kepler’s field of view is 33,000 times wider than Hubble’s, or about the size of a human hand held up to the sky. The Cygnus-Lyra region near the plane of the Milky Way encompasses about 4.5 million stars. But most of those are too big or hot to allow a habitable zone close enough to the star for Kepler to see a transit.

The science team has selected about 150,000 sun-like stars for Kepler to analyze. Over time, Fanson said, the number will be winnowed down to about 100,000 in three classes: G-type stars, which are similar in size and age to the sun; K- and M-type stars, which are slightly smaller and cooler; and A- and F-class stars, which are somewhat bigger.

Earth is in the center of the habitable zone around the sun, but with stars of other classes, that zone would be closer to the star or farther out.

Kepler’s telescope is outfitted with a sophisticated camera that will stare unblinkingly at the star field. The whole area will be imaged every six seconds, then stored in 30-minute chunks.

Once a month, Kepler will do a pirouette in space to download its stored data, Fanson said.

Full Article…

Kepler blasts off in search of Earth-like planets – Los Angeles Times.

NASA’s Swift Gamma-Ray Explorer satellite took this shot of Comet Lulin on Jan. 28, and regular folks may be able to catch their own glimpse with binoculars in a few days.

The image was taken as the comet was passing through the constellation Libra, 100 million miles from Earth and 115 million miles from the sun. It combines data from Swift’s optical and ultraviolet telescope (the blue colors) and its X-ray telescope (red). The star-field background comes from a Digital Sky Survey image.

Lulin’s tail — grit and grains from the comet’s rock-and-ice surface pushed off into space by solar radiation — extends to the right. Lulin is shedding 800 gallons of water every second, according to NASA astronomers. That’s enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in less than 15 minutes.

Solar radiation also breaks comet water down into hydroxyl particles, composed of one oxygen and one hydrogen molecule. Swift determined that the hydroxyl cloud around Lulin is about 250,000 miles wide, slightly greater than the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Lulin, discovered in July 2007, is now visible to the naked eye in dark, rural skies. But the view will get better: On the night of Feb. 23, Lulin will pass within 38 million miles of Earth, appearing about 2 degrees south-southwest of Saturn in the night sky. Stargazers with binoculars should get a good look. By mid-March, Lulin will have zoomed off into deep space and out of sight.

Rare Comet Close-Up Coming to a Sky Near You | Wired Science from Wired.com.

Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites — one American, the other Russian — smashed into each other hundreds of miles above the Earth.

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.

The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said.

“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the international space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course.

ABC News: Scientists Eye Debris After Satellite Collision.

Hubble mystery light puzzles astronomers – Discovery.com- msnbc.com.