NASA Identifies 54 Potentially Habitable Alien Planets

Denise Chow
, SPACE.com Staff Writer
Space.com denise Chow
, Space.com Staff Writer
space.com – 2 hrs 13 mins ago

NASA released a wealth of new data today (Feb. 2) from its planet-seeking Kepler space telescope, significantly increasing the number of potential new alien planets, and revealing that smaller worlds and multi-planet systems may be more common than previously thought.

To date, more than 500 alien planets outside of our solar system have been discovered, but that number could more than double if all the candidate exoplanets from the new Kepler data are confirmed. Amid the 1,200 possible alien worlds, Kepler has already found 68 potentially Earth-size planets.

The data release is based on observations conducted between May 2 and Sept. 17, 2009.

"What's incredibly interesting is that they're now going to give us a list of small planets," said Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "Some of them could actually be in what we call a habitable zone. If they were rocky or if they are rocky, they have a potential for being habitats."

And while astronomers are ultimately searching for an Earth-size rocky planet in the habitable zone, a lot can be learned from studying planets and systems that are less

"We can learn a lot about planet formation and start to understand how these systems form," Kaltenegger told SPACE.com. "So far, we only have our own system, so the more samples we have, the more we can learn about how planets form, how they move, how they migrate."

NASA is holding a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST today to discuss the findings in greater detail.

The Kepler spacecraft is the first NASA mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets in or near the so-called habitable zone – the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet orbiting its host star.

Although additional observations are required over time, Kepler is detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help better understand our solar system's place in the galaxy.

During a scheduled contact with the planet-hunting telescope yesterday (Feb. 1), engineers discovered that the spacecraft was in safe mode, with its photometer and star trackers powered off. This is a self protection mechanism that the spacecraft enters when something unexpected occurs, and Kepler is currently rotating along a sun-aligned axis with its solar arrays pointed at the sun.

Analysis of all spacecraft data indicates the subsystems remain healthy, NASA officials said. Engineers have begun the recovery process and are evaluating data from the spacecraft subsystems to determine what triggered the safe mode.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/201102...NhaWRlbnRpZmk-

NASA astronomers have announced that they have discovered the first planet, which in its parameters is almost identical to the Earth, and is also located in the "habitable zone" near its star, which creates conditions for the presence of water. The planet was named TOI 700 d and was discovered by the TESS satellite and the Spitzer space telescope. The celestial body is located near a cool dwarf class M - TOI 700. This star system is located very far from Earth, in the southern constellation Dorado, at a distance of 100 light-years.
So they find new planets pretty often but now it is more interesting when we could send a mission there..