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The 95 Megapixel Camera....

By Dan Markel, Ethan Leib, Rick Garnett, Matt Bodie, Paul Horwitz , Steve Vladeck, and Orly Lobel

On Friday, NASA launches the Kepler spacecraft that will bear the largest telescope ever sent into space. It'll be monitoring 100,000 stars, checking on each of them every half hour, to figure out whether they have planets (and all about those planets). Astonishing. The telescope is operating under this "transit" method. Apparently, planets that pass in front of a star can't themselves be seen, but they diminish the star's brightness enough that this amazing telescope will be able to determine their mass, location, orbits, etc. We're apparently now done with astrometry, which was looking at fluctuations in a star's position...

Full post as published by Prawfs on March 04, 2009 (boomark / email).