NASA to announce new Kepler discovery: Watch it live 11am PT/2pm ET
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-kepler-discovery-live-stream-20130417,0,1118452.storyNASA to announce new Kepler discovery: Watch it live
By Deborah Netburn
April 18, 2013, 7:00 a.m.
What did NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission find now? Find out when you watch a NASA news briefing live, right here.
At 11 a.m. Pacific time, NASA will host a news briefing detailing the latest discoveries from the agency's Kepler Space Telescope, and we'll be streaming the press conference live.
The telescope has been scanning the skies for nearly four years, looking for planets where liquid water -- and possibly life -- might exist.
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The ultimate goal of the mission is to find "Goldilocks planets" where it is neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold.
You'll find live streaming video of the conference below.
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2
= new reply since forum marked as read
That wasn't the Kepler mission. Wasn't it MSL (Mars Science Laboratory == Curiosity rover)?
And it is very likely that MSL discoveries will change the textbooks. Unfortunately, the guy who made that announcement on the MSL team did not make clear that point. He learned the hard way, I suppose, how not to word a statement to the press.
Such is how things are sometimes. Scientists need to learn some media communication skills.
I suspect this will be a candidate Earth-like planet, something Kepler was designed to discover. Unfortunately, it takes multiple orbits to detect each planet. At an Earth-like distance that means three or four transits will likely be necessary. For Earth, that's three or four years, of course.
Who knows what this is? We'll see.
Newfound exoplanet Kepler-62f is imagined in an illustration. The shining star to the right is Kepler-62e. Illustration courtesy T. Pyle, Caltech/NASA
Planet hunters are significantly closer to their goal of finding an "Earth twin" with the discovery of two planets similar in size to our own, astronomers with NASA's Kepler mission announced today.
The planets, described at a NASA press conference, orbit a sun that's cooler than ours but is at the right distance to allow water to remain liquid, which is considered essential for a planet to support life.
And because of their sizes and orbits, the newfound planets are likely either rocky—like Earth—or watery, NASA scientists said. The two planets are located 1,200 light-years away in a five-planet system orbiting a star dubbed Kepler-62.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/04/130418-exoplanets-earth-planets-science-space-kepler-nasa/
