Kepler, an orbital telescope designed specifically to find habitable planets, launched successfully today, about 37 minutes ago according to the Kepler Portal. You can get details at the launch blog, but we will have to wait a bit before the first Earth-like planets are located. Other links on the topic worth looking at include one from BBC News, and Kepler itself has a Twitter presence for those who want to follow it.
JPL has a searchable database of exoplanets that currently lists the 340 known planets around other stars. None of them is Earth-like, most being gas giants, several orbiting pulsars, and a handful being on the border between planets and stars (the so-called Hot Jupiter model). That may change in the next few weeks with the launch of Kepler, an orbital telescope designed specifically to find habitable planets. It’s about time we get a realistic idea how common potentially life-bearing worlds are, and either meet the neighbors or get ready to move.
Peak visibility for Comet Lulin will be on Monday night, but the viewing is good all weekend with the right sky. Sky and Telescope has the details you will need to spot it yourself, and APOD just had a good picture of this green visitor. We are also pointing some other observational resources at it, like the Swift spacecraft, which is looking at it in the ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths.
Google has been gathering the data for a while now for their Google Mars project. I first linked to its early version in March, 2006, but as you can see from the current version it has come a long way. As of yesterday, they announced its integration with the Google Earth 5 App. Time to download and install this puppy! Of course, it is currently in Beta, so whether you run Google Windoze or the Mac version it has some flaws. Just remember to send your bug reports back in, so they can get it working better. Meanwhile, a few videos to give you the idea…
As the title implies, these are just a few links to several of the Space E-Zines I enjoy visiting. The Space Site is a good one, with everything from News to a Community Forum. So is Astrosurf, although it helps if you know French for this one. For the Educators who might find their way here, I can recommend Discovery School, as well as Lesson Planet. And while this is a specific story about SpaceShipOne, the BBC maintains a lot of great space/science news, so you should bookkmark it and follow it back to its source. Enjoy!
The Hubble Space Telescope is at risk of no longer being maintained, according to BBC News (and lots of other sources). The best place to find the latest info, as well as a detailed background, is at The Hubblesite. And if you’re in the mood for more things Hubble, you might want to check the European Hubble Homepage, a great place to get another perspective.