March 7, 2009
Kepler Space Telescope Launches
The Kepler space mission is underway. At 22:49 on Friday March 6th, the Kepler spacecraft was launched into space on a Delta II rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The missions goals are to search for rocky or terrestrial planets like the Earth. It will be observing an area of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is rich in Sun like stars and looking for a slight dimming in these stars light output. This dimming would reveal a planet transiting the star.
Once a transit has been detected scientists can deduce much information about both the orbiting planet and its host star. The size of the planets orbit will be found by using Kepler`s 3rd Law of planetary motion. The planets size can be determined by how much the light from the star drops during the transit and the size of the star. And from knowing the size of the orbit and the stars temperature whether or not this planet could be habitable can be ascertained.
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NASA's Phoenix has collected an ice sample, delivered it into it's oven, and confirmed that water exists on Mars.
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After a bit of a struggle to deliver the sample to the landers internal lab, the experiment was completed and the existence of water on Mars has been confirmed.
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June 2, 2008
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Already Doing Research
The Phoenix Mars Lander, a mission to explore the Martian northern arctic plain, which launched from earth on 4 August, 2007, safely landed in the northern polar region of Mars on 25 May, 2008. No small feat as this was the first successful soft landing (one not using airbags) since the Viking 2 landing in 1976.
And the results are already coming in. The Canadian Space Agencies meteorological station gave its weather report for Sol 4 "sunny but dusty with increasing dust, causing decreasing visibility. High -30C, Low -80C, no wind measurements available.
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There has been possible ice found under the lander as well.
On Sol 7 (1 June, 2008) its robotic arm scooped its first sample from the surface of the red planet.
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All seems to be going well so far.
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