[SashaLionx]

Five potential habitable exoplanets now
July 20, 2012 By Abel Mendez Torres



(Phys.org) -- New data suggest the confirmation of the exoplanet Gliese 581g and the best candidate so far of a potential habitable exoplanet. The nearby star Gliese 581 is well known for having four planets with the outermost planet, Gliese 581d, already suspected habitable. This will be the first time evidence for any two potential habitable exoplanets orbiting the same star. Gliese 581g will be included, together with Gliese 667Cc, Kepler-22b, HD85512, and Gliese 581d, in the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog of the PHL @ UPR Arecibo as the best five objects of interest for Earth-like exoplanets.




Doubts about the existence of Gliese 581g appeared only two weeks after its announcement on September 29, 2010 by astronomers of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. Scientists from the HARPS Team from the Geneva Observatory, which discovered all the previously known four planets around Gliese 581, were not able to detect Gliese 581g out of their own data, which included additional observations. Further analysis by others scientists also questioned the existence of Gliese 581g in the last two years.





Now the original discoverers of Gliese 581g, led by Steven S. Vogt of UC Santa Cruz, present a new analysis with an extended dataset from the HARPS instrument that shows more promising evidence for its existence. The new analysis strength their original assumption that all the planets around Gliese 581 are in circular and not elliptical orbits as currently believed. It is under this likely assumption that the Gliese 581g signal appears in the new data.

“This signal has a False Alarm Probability of < 4% and is consistent with a planet of minimum mass 2.2M [Earth masses], orbiting squarely in the star’s Habitable Zone at 0.13 AU, where liquid water on planetary surfaces is a distinct possibility” said Vogt.

Based on the new data Gliese 581g probably has a radius not larger than 1.5 times Earth radii. It receives about the same light flux as Earth does from the Sun due to its closer orbital position around a dim red dwarf star. These factors combine to make Gliese 581g the most Earth-like planet known with an Earth Similarity Index, a measure of Earth-likeness from zero to one, of 0.92 and higher than the previously top candidate Gliese 667Cc, discovered last year.



“The controversy around Gliese 581g will continue and we decided to include it to our main catalog based on the new significant evidence presented, and until more is known about the architecture of this interesting stellar system” said Abel Méndez, Director of the PHL @ UPR Arecibo.





Authors on the original paper are Steven S. Vogt, UCO/Lick Observatory, UCSC; Paul Butler, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution; and Nader Haghighipour of the Institute for Astronomy and NASA Astrobiology Institute. Their research is published online on July 20, 2012 in the journal Astronomical Notes, 333, No. 7, 561-575. More information: arxiv.org/abs/1207.4515

phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-potenti...anets.html#jCp

[pongeystrhjst]

It worries me that the Kepler spacecraft has found practically no planet candidates (OK, 4) with an orbit further from the star than Earth is. This means that of those 2321 planet candidates the only ones that are in the so-called habitable zone are those around red dwarfs, and that's not a great prospect. Where are the planets further out? Kepler ought to be able to find very many of them - a dip in the light curve of a star from a planet a long way out is just as strong as a dip from a planet closer in.

[YpciJQdo]

An E-mail that arrived when I was away....
Should supplement this thread very nicely......



MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov




News release: 2012-211 July 18, 2012

Spitzer Finds Possible Exoplanet Smaller Than Earth

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cf...lease_2012-211

PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what
they believe is a planet two-thirds the size of Earth. The exoplanet candidate, called UCF-1.01, is
located a mere 33 light-years away, making it possibly the nearest world to our solar system that
is smaller than our home planet.

Exoplanets circle stars beyond our sun. Only a handful smaller than Earth have been found so
far. Spitzer has performed transit studies on known exoplanets, but UCF-1.01 is the first ever
identified with the space telescope, pointing to a possible role for Spitzer in helping discover
potentially habitable, terrestrial-sized worlds.

"We have found strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very near planet with the help of
the Spitzer Space Telescope," said Kevin Stevenson from the University of Central Florida in
Orlando. Stevenson is lead author of the paper, which has been accepted for publication in The
Astrophysical Journal. "Identifying nearby small planets such as UCF-1.01 may one day lead to
their characterization using future instruments."

The hot, new-planet candidate was found unexpectedly in Spitzer observations. Stevenson and
his colleagues were studying the Neptune-sized exoplanet GJ 436b, already known to exist
around the red-dwarf star GJ 436. In the Spitzer data, the astronomers noticed slight dips in the
amount of infrared light streaming from the star, separate from the dips caused by GJ 436b. A
review of Spitzer archival data showed the dips were periodic, suggesting a second planet might
be orbiting the star and blocking out a small fraction of the star's light.

This technique, used by a number of observatories including NASA's Kepler space telescope,
relies on transits to detect exoplanets. The duration of a transit and the small decrease in the
amount of light registered reveals basic properties of an exoplanet, such as its size and distance
from its star. In UCF-1.01's case, its diameter would be approximately 5,200 miles (8,400
kilometers), or two-thirds that of Earth. UCF-1.01 would revolve quite tightly around GJ 436, at
about seven times the distance of Earth from the moon, with its "year" lasting only 1.4 Earth
days. Given this proximity to its star, far closer than the planet Mercury is to our sun, the
exoplanet's surface temperature would be more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 600
degrees Celsius).

If the roasted, diminutive planet candidate ever had an atmosphere, it almost surely has
evaporated. UCF-1.01 might therefore resemble a cratered, mostly geologically dead world like
Mercury. Paper co-author Joseph Harrington, also of the University of Central Florida and
principal investigator of the research, suggested another possibility; that the extreme heat of
orbiting so close to GJ 436 has melted the exoplanet's surface.

"The planet could even be covered in magma," Harrington said.

In addition to UCF-1.01, Stevenson and his colleagues noticed hints of a third planet, dubbed
UCF-1.02, orbiting GJ 436. Spitzer has observed evidence of the two new planets several times
each. However, even the most sensitive instruments are unable to measure exoplanet masses as
small as UCF-1.01 and UCF-1.02, which are perhaps only one-third the mass of Earth. Knowing
the mass is required for confirming a discovery, so the paper authors are cautiously calling both
bodies exoplanet candidates for now.

Of the approximately 1,800 stars identified by NASA' Kepler space telescope as candidates for
having planetary systems, just three are verified to contain sub-Earth-sized exoplanets. Of these,
only one exoplanet is thought to be smaller than the Spitzer candidates, with a radius similar to
Mars, or 57 percent that of Earth.

"I hope future observations will confirm these exciting results, which show Spitzer may be able
to discover exoplanets as small as Mars," said Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Even after almost nine years in space,
Spitzer's observations continue to take us in new and important scientific directions."

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope
mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted
at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data
are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis
Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit
http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

[LICraig]

> Spitzer Finds Possible Exoplanet Smaller Than Earth

Fully 90 Kepler Planet Candidates are smaller than Earth, so they're not at all unusual. The news is that it was imaged by Spitzer - possibly.

[PristisoliTer]

How planetary resource's asteroid search could help find exoplanets
August 24, 2012 By Nancy Atkinson




Planetary Resources is the private company that wants to eventually mine asteroids for profit. But initially, the group will focus on developing Earth orbiting telescopes to scan for the best asteroids, and then later, create low-cost robotic spacecraft for surveying missions and then actual spacecraft to do the mining.




But in the meantime, Planetary Resources has opened up the option of allowing access to their Arkyd-100 space telescope to others, and put out the question: "What would you do if you had access to our Arkyd-100 space telescopes?"

An MIT Researcher said he could use the Arkyd telescope to find alien planets.

Dr. Vlada Stamenkovic, a post-doctoral researcher at MIT who searches for exoplanets—distant alien worlds beyond our solar system—sent in this video to Planetary Resources with his explanation:





"It's inspiring to think that the Arkyd can help researchers like Vlada discover Earth-like planets, and perhaps, someday, even life out there among the stars," Planetary Resources said on their website. "We're excited to see such enthusiasm around our projects."

Another of the aims of Planetary Resources is to open deep-space exploration to private industry, much like the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition, which Planetary Resources member Peter Diamandis created. In previous talks, Diamandis has estimated that a small asteroid is worth about "20 trillion dollars in the platinum group metal marketplace."

More information: If you have something smaller in mind, perhaps similar to the proposal by Stamenkovic, Planetary Resources has opened up the possibility for anyone to submit a request for using their telescopes. If you have an idea, record a 90-second video on how you'd like to use the Arkyd-100, and share it with Planetary Resources. That can be done by creating a video response to this You Tube video or adding a link to your video on PRI's website.

Provided by Universe Today




http://phys.org/news/2012-08-planeta...xoplanets.html

[orbidewa]

Nice to see Asteroid mining still at the forefront of thinking with people...

[rouletteroulette]

Nice to see Asteroid mining still at the forefront of thinking with people...

Note: Does not include anyone in my household.

[emily]

Note: Does not include anyone in my household.

Well I'm naturally speaking of those at the coal front.

[MP+4]

Well I'm naturally speaking of those at the coal front.

1) Asteroids have got coal now? I didn't get that memo.
2) I don't imagine the blokes on the draglines or the air drill think much about asteroids.

[Petrushkaukrop]

Not much worthwhile to comment on so I found this info....

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::
There are near-limitless numbers of asteroids and more being discovered every year. More than 1,500 are as easy to reach as the Moon and are in similar orbits as Earth. Asteroids are filled with precious resources, everything from water to platinum. Harnessing valuable minerals from a practically infinite source will provide stability on Earth, increase humanity’s prosperity, and help establish and maintain human presence in space.


OUR VISION

Planetary Resources is bringing the natural resources of space within humanity’s economic sphere of influence, propelling our future into the 21st century and beyond. Water from asteroids will fuel the in-space economy, and rare metals will increase Earth’s GDP.


Asteroids are the low-hanging fruit of the Solar System. There are close to 9,000 near-Earth asteroids, and nearly 1,000 more are discovered every year.

Low cost commercial robotic spacecraft will explore asteroids and determine their position, composition, and accessibility of resources.



Asteroid mining will allow the delivery of resources to the point of need, be it a fuel depot orbiting the Earth, or elsewhere in the Solar System.



There are no roads where we’re headed. But we have a map.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Planetary Resources’ near-term goals are to dramatically reduce the cost of asteroid exploration. We will combine the best practices of commercial aerospace innovation, operational adaptability, and rapid manufacturing to create robotic explorers that cost an order of magnitude less than current systems. We will control costs by constraining scope and creating simple designs that can be executed by a small, expert team. And although we will hold ourselves to the highest standards and practices, we will aggressively accept mission risk where appropriate.

Our philosophy will allow rapid development of private, commercial interplanetary space exploration. In light of fiscal challenges facing the spaceflight community, innovation in cost and market is as valuable as innovation in capability.

TECHNOLOGY

While much of Planetary Resources’ technology is proprietary, our technological approach is driven by a few simple principles to enable innovation in cost. We are incorporating recent innovations in commercial microelectronics, medical devices, and information technology, in ways not traditionally used by robotic spacecraft.

Deep space exploration also presents specific challenges to spacecraft design. Critical to our success are advancements in the fields of collaborative exploration, deep space optical communications, and efficient micro-propulsion. Planetary Resources is actively working in these areas for our own efforts as well as for NASA and the benefit of the greater space science community.

Flexibility in our design, and implementation in a small package, will enable launch opportunities by taking advantage of rideshare with other spacecraft.



Leo is the first private space telescope and a stepping-stone to near-Earth asteroids. This space telescope, utilized in low Earth orbit, represents the next milestone on our technology development roadmap.

At Planetary Resources, we are committed to a disciplined approach of fielding systems simple enough to be designed, manufactured, tested and integrated by a small team, yet robust enough to get the job done. Leo will demonstrate that critical capability in Earth orbit.

The resulting capability of Leo, at an unprecedented low price, empowers a new community to intimately participate in space-based remote sensing and the further exploration of the cosmos.



Adding propulsion capabilities and additional scientific instrumentation to the Leo Space Telescope enables an Earth-crossing asteroid Interceptor mission. Several undiscovered asteroids are seen for the first time as they routinely cross through Earth’s neighborhood. By hitching a ride with a launched satellite headed for a geostationary orbit, Interceptor will be well positioned to fly-by and collect data on these new targets of opportunity.

Two or more Interceptors can work together as a team to potentially identify, track and fly-by the asteroids that travel between the Earth and our Moon. The closest encounters may result in a planned spacecraft “intercept,” providing the highest-resolution data, similar to how government efforts first explored the Moon with the Ranger missions (1961-65) and later with the Deep Impact mission at Comet 9P/Tempel (2005).

These Interceptor missions will allow Planetary Resources to quickly acquire data on several near-Earth asteroids.



By augmenting the Interceptor spacecraft with deep space laser communication capability, Planetary Resources can launch the Rendezvous Prospector mission to a more distant asteroid, much further away from Earth. Orbiting the asteroid, the Rendezvous Prospector will collect data on the asteroid’s shape, rotation, density, and surface and sub-surface composition.

Through the use of multiple Rendezvous Prospector spacecraft, Planetary Resources will distribute mission risk across several units and allow for broad based functionality within the cluster of spacecraft.

Rendezvous Prospector also results in the creation and demonstration of a low-cost interplanetary spacecraft capability, of interest to potential customers such as NASA, scientific agencies, or other private exploratory organizations.



ASTEROID MINING
Redefining “natural resources” for the benefit of humanity




nitial space resource development will focus on water-rich asteroids. Water is the essence of life and exists in plentiful supply on asteroids. Access to water and other life-supporting volatiles in space provides hydration, breathable air, radiation shielding and even manufacturing capabilities. Water’s elements, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used to formulate rocket fuel. Using the resources of space – to explore space – will enable the large-scale exploration of the Solar System.

Recovery and processing of materials in a microgravity environment will occur through significant research and development. Planetary Resources will lead the creation of critical in-situ extraction and processing technologies to provide access to both asteroidal water and metals. When combined with our low-cost deep space explorers, this represents an enabling capability for the sustainable development of space.





learn more at:


http://www.planetaryresources.com/technology/

[ftqwhbvxlcfop]

reading that puff i thought the Leo Space telescope was already up there. it isn't even built yet.

[namaikaimvputka]

reading that puff i thought the Leo Space telescope was already up there. it isn't even built yet.

Leo is the space telescope that Planetary Resources will use as a stepping-stone to near-Earth asteroids. The low Earth orbit telescope, the Arkyd 100 series is Planetary Resources' scout vehicle.

Scheduled to be put into low-Earth orbit by the end of next year the craft will use optical spectroscopy to determine asteroid composition and assess whether it is a potential target for asteroid prospecting.

Critical to the success of their program, Planetary Resources says, is the development of tools including collaborative exploration, deep space optical communications, and efficient micro-propulsion.
April 24, 2012 6:56 PM PDT



http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10012086-2.html
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::


May even beat the JWST into orbit. :-)

[GreesyBeeva]

Kepler finds first multi-planet system around a binary star
August 28, 2012



NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star, characterized in large part by University of Texas at Austin astronomers using two telescopes at the university's McDonald Observatory in West Texas. The finding, which proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star, is published in the August 28 issue of the journal Science.



It's Tatooine, right?" said McDonald Observatory astronomer Michael Endl. "But this was not shown in Star Wars," he said, referring to the periodic changes in the amount of daylight falling on a planet with two suns. Measurements of the star's orbits showed that daylight on the planets would vary by a large margin over the 7.4-Earth-day period as the two stars completed their mutual orbits, each moving closer to, then farther from, the planets (which are themselves moving).



The binary star in question is called Kepler-47. The primary star is about the same mass as the Sun, and its companion is an M-dwarf star one-third its size. The inner planet is three times the size of Earth and orbits the binary star every 49.5 days, while the outer planet is 4.6 times the size of Earth with an orbit of 303.2 days.



The outer planet is the first planet found to orbit a binary star within the "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist and thus create a home for life. However, the planet's size (about the same as Uranus) means that it is an icy giant, and not an abode for life. It's a tantalizing taste of discoveries waiting to be made.


The combination of observations from the NASA mission and McDonald Observatory allowed astronomers to understand the characteristics of Kepler-47's two stars and two planets.



The Kepler mission looks for minute dips in the amount of light coming from a star that might indicate a planet is passing in front of it, an event called a "transit." The space telescope is also adept at identifying eclipsing binary stars, in which two stars pass in front of each other as they orbit each other. In the case of Kepler-47, they found both stellar eclipses and planet transits in one system.



So Kepler astronomers Jerome Orosz (lead author on the study) and William Welsh of San Diego State University flagged the Kepler-47 system as worthy of follow up from the ground. They asked the McDonald Observatory Kepler team to work with them.

Endl studied the binary star with the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET, one of the world's largest telescopes), as well as the 2.7-meter Harlan J. Smith Telescope at McDonald.


"The challenging thing is that this is a very faint star," Endl said, "about 6,000 times dimmer than can be seen with the naked eye."

He was taking spectra of the system—looking for characteristics in its light to indicate the motions of the primary star. (The secondary star is too faint to measure.) The McDonald observations enabled astronomers to calculate the mass of the primary star.

These values, along with the Kepler eclipse and transit timings, were plugged into a model that calculated the relative sizes of all the bodies involved, Endl said.

The Kepler team at McDonald Observatory also includes Bill Cochran (a co-Investigator of the Kepler mission), research scientist Phillip MacQueen, graduate students Paul Robertson and Eric Brugamyer, and recent graduate Caroline Caldwell.

"This is the type of research where McDonald Observatory really excels," Cochran said. "We have excellent scientific instruments on our telescopes, and the queue-scheduled operation of the HET allows us to obtain spectra at the optimal times when they will give us the best information about the stars."




http://phys.org/news/2012-08-kepler-...nary-star.html

[Bridgester]

It had to happen eventually!

[Mark_NyB]

It worries me that the Kepler spacecraft has found practically no planet candidates (OK, 4) with an orbit further from the star than Earth is. This means that of those 2321 planet candidates the only ones that are in the so-called habitable zone are those around red dwarfs, and that's not a great prospect. Where are the planets further out? Kepler ought to be able to find very many of them - a dip in the light curve of a star from a planet a long way out is just as strong as a dip from a planet closer in. I've just completed a reanalysis of a small part of the Kepler light curves and have come up with a total of 23 planet candidates with a semi-major axis greater than 1 AU. Part of the problem was that Kepler was allocating to "single transit" planet candidates orbital periods that were inconsistent with the length of the data record. In other cases the calculated orbital periods were just plain wrong.

I've also found out that if the number distribution of planets with semi-major axis a is N(a) then the number distribution Kepler expects to see is a-7/4N(a). With the new analysis of Kepler data, we get that 35% of all planets are further from the star than 1 AU. That's good (better that 1%), but it may be that we're still missing some transits of long period planets in the Kepler light curves. If I look for dips of really long duration then I might start to pick up starspots on fast-rotating stars.

Kepler finds first multi-planet system around a binary star The analysis I just completed of a very small part of the Kepler data spotted two systems each with a single planet orbiting a binary star.