Kepler Discoveries

reply to post by nataylor


After getting very, very familiar with the Kepler mission I was at first under the impression it was meant to be used to verify the existence of already known planets (outside the earth's atmosphere). But I see I was mistaken (I hate it when that happens) in its purpose, which is to prove that there are far more planets orbiting stars.

Usually, I take a little more interest in any kind of mission like this, but I had wrongly assumed Keplers function.

To the OP and anyone else the James Webb would be a more suited platform for confirmation of stars with planets closer to us. Where Kepler is a planet hunter, it is more to designed for creating a baseline for Drakes equation around main sequence stars (stars like our sun).

reply to post by Illustronic


Yes, but now and then we get a few leaps such as splitting the atom, allowing for forms of transportation, energy creation or weapons that were unthinkable before. Already interstellar travel is plausible and perhaps even possible the biggest hurdle is not if we can...it sadly is money.

Originally posted by abeverage
reply to post by nataylor

 

After getting very, very familiar with the Kepler mission I was at first under the impression it was meant to be used to verify the existence of already known planets (outside the earth's atmosphere).

Well that's a relief Kepler wasn't going to find any of those, I'd suspect finding a planet in our earth's atmosphere would be devastating to life as we know and enjoy! This deserves a rare use of a smily from me.

Originally posted by abeverage
reply to post by Illustronic

 

Yes, but now and then we get a few leaps such as splitting the atom, allowing for forms of transportation, energy creation or weapons that were unthinkable before. Already interstellar travel is plausible and perhaps even possible the biggest hurdle is not if we can...it sadly is money.

Well it would be a huge leap, considering the fastest space probe speed ever achieved were the Helios 1 and 2 probes that reached around 158,000 mph from a solar slingshot just inside the orbit of Mercury, of course small unmanned probes. Even 10% light speed (c) one would be going over 67 million mph, and even at that speed it would take over 80 years to get to our nearest star, outside of our Solar System. The fastest man ever went was just under 25,000 mph in Apollo 10.

Actually liquid fueled rockets provide excellent thrust, able to sustain 4Gs plus, greater than anything on the drawing boards, the problem is fueling them. Hypothetically even at 1G acceleration from earth orbit to the nearest star one would expect about a 67 year trip, to pass the closest star, although at that 1G acceleration if one wants to also stop at that star system, half of the trip would have to involve 1G deceleration, so double that time frame for a realistic destination aimed trip, unless more than 1G deceleration could be sustained or even achieved for any substantial length of time. It was an involved calculation exercise these numbers come from, leaving out many variables of a realistic flight, like for instance material structure which at speeds entering 10% c interstellar dust and stray subatomic particle impact would shred anything we know of. So there's also that, a bigger leap from fire to splitting an atom IMO.

I don't think money is thwarting substantial advances in generating that kind of thrust or material science.