The Kepler Spacecraft
For centuries, humankind was unable to distinguish whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. It was nearly impossible to capture the individual signals being emitted from distant planets such as reduced brilliance when the planet passes in front of its parent star without some type of space telescope. Thus, in March 2009, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), launched the Kepler spacecraft. The primary mission of this new instrument was to investigate the diversity and structure of planetary systems. The spacecraft moves in a slightly slower, Earth-trailing orbit in order to ensure that it did not interfere with the region of the sky it was observing. The success of the Kepler has helped …show more content…
The instrument is about 2.7 meters and 4.7 meters high, with a total weight of 1052.3 kilograms at launch, making it the largest telescope to be launched into interplanetary space to date. The Kepler’s field of view spans nearly twenty degrees wide, which is one of the reasons why the Hubble Space Telescope was inadequate for this particular mission. The Hubble Space Telescope only has the ability to focus on one bright star in its field of view at any given time, whereas the Kepler’s can be compared to the size of two big “dips” of the Big Dipper. It is unfortunate, in terms of cost, that the Hubble Space Telescope is not able to do the job. The approximated cost of the Kepler mission is nearly six hundred million dollars, which includes the design, construction, launch and operation of the spacecraft in addition to data collection and scientific analysis (“Kepler FAQ”, …show more content…
It is far more advanced than any telescope sold on the market today, and can be rotated every eighty days or so to observe a different field. At the base of this technology is a “0.95-m aperture Schmidt telescope” (“Characteristics of the Kepler Space Telescope”, n.d.), allowing it to capture very high-resolution images using camera-like apparatus. It contains twenty-one modules, each of them covering five square degrees of vision, and resulting in twenty-one “images” of the field. Unfortunately, as of August 2016, three of those modules are no longer working. It is thought that circuitry failure is the reasoning behind these failures (Hunter, 2016). In addition to its “picture-taking” abilities, the Kepler telescope also contains a photometer, which spans a range of four hundred and twenty to nine hundred nanometres (420-900 nm). This measurement goes well beyond the typical optical spectrum, and heightens the machine’s light sensitivity and detection ability (“Kepler Space Telescope”, 2016). Such equipment has allowed for the discovery of the newly-minted “Heartbeat Stars”, and various other phenomena. It is because of all of this advanced that technology that the Kepler telescope remains at the forefront of assisting in astronomical discoveries, and is perhaps one of the greatest scientific instruments ever
For centuries, humankind was unable to distinguish whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. It was nearly impossible to capture the individual signals being emitted from distant planets such as reduced brilliance when the planet passes in front of its parent star without some type of space telescope. Thus, in March 2009, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), launched the Kepler spacecraft. The primary mission of this new instrument was to investigate the diversity and structure of planetary systems. The spacecraft moves in a slightly slower, Earth-trailing orbit in order to ensure that it did not interfere with the region of the sky it was observing. The success of the Kepler has helped …show more content…
The instrument is about 2.7 meters and 4.7 meters high, with a total weight of 1052.3 kilograms at launch, making it the largest telescope to be launched into interplanetary space to date. The Kepler’s field of view spans nearly twenty degrees wide, which is one of the reasons why the Hubble Space Telescope was inadequate for this particular mission. The Hubble Space Telescope only has the ability to focus on one bright star in its field of view at any given time, whereas the Kepler’s can be compared to the size of two big “dips” of the Big Dipper. It is unfortunate, in terms of cost, that the Hubble Space Telescope is not able to do the job. The approximated cost of the Kepler mission is nearly six hundred million dollars, which includes the design, construction, launch and operation of the spacecraft in addition to data collection and scientific analysis (“Kepler FAQ”, …show more content…
It is far more advanced than any telescope sold on the market today, and can be rotated every eighty days or so to observe a different field. At the base of this technology is a “0.95-m aperture Schmidt telescope” (“Characteristics of the Kepler Space Telescope”, n.d.), allowing it to capture very high-resolution images using camera-like apparatus. It contains twenty-one modules, each of them covering five square degrees of vision, and resulting in twenty-one “images” of the field. Unfortunately, as of August 2016, three of those modules are no longer working. It is thought that circuitry failure is the reasoning behind these failures (Hunter, 2016). In addition to its “picture-taking” abilities, the Kepler telescope also contains a photometer, which spans a range of four hundred and twenty to nine hundred nanometres (420-900 nm). This measurement goes well beyond the typical optical spectrum, and heightens the machine’s light sensitivity and detection ability (“Kepler Space Telescope”, 2016). Such equipment has allowed for the discovery of the newly-minted “Heartbeat Stars”, and various other phenomena. It is because of all of this advanced that technology that the Kepler telescope remains at the forefront of assisting in astronomical discoveries, and is perhaps one of the greatest scientific instruments ever