Boulder – Scientists have discovered more than 230 planets circling stars other than the sun, but most of those worlds have turned out to be huge gas balls like Jupiter.
For those of us living on such a different planet – a small, rocky place, rich in water – it’s difficult to imagine life on a hot Jupiter.
So, Boulder engineers are building NASA’s next-generation planet hunter: a $559 million space observatory that will search 170,000 stars for Earthlike planets – places that might harbor life as we know it.
“We’ll look for habitable planets, places where liquid water can exist on an Earth-sized planet,” said Monte Henderson, Kepler project manager at Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder.
“If we can’t find one,” Henderson said, “then it would lend credence to the hypothesis that we might be alone.”
That doesn’t seem likely, said Chris McKay, a NASA astrobiologist who specializes in the search for life on other planets.
“I think they’re going to see more hits than they’re going to be able to count,” McKay said.
Ball’s Henderson also led the company’s smashing Deep Impact mission, which shot a copper slug into a comet for NASA in 2005, revealing the comet’s interior and its fragile, dusty nature.
Kepler, based on the same hardware as Deep Impact, is scheduled to launch in November 2008 and will orbit the Sun in a path similar to Earth’s.
After three years of delay and a $250 million increase in project costs, engineers are assembling the bus-sized spacecraft in a sophisticated east Boulder warehouse.
The cost overrun is regrettable, said William Borucki, NASA’s lead on the Kepler mission, “but when you’re trying to do something no one has ever done before, this is what you have to expect.”
Kepler’s optics rely on the biggest lens sent into space, Borucki said, a massive 55-inch mirror fronted by a square-foot “corrector” of pure sapphire.
The spacebound observatory cannot waver as it stares at the same region of space for four years, Borucki said. A blinklike blip, and Kepler might miss the tiny dimming of starlight as an Earthlike planet zips across the face of its star.
Kepler will search for planets with that “transit” method, NASA’s McKay said. Two other techniques used today are great at finding massive planets, Mc Kay said, but not the small ones, where recognizable life might exist.
Last month, European scientists announced they had discovered a rocky planet, small and warm enough that it might have water.
That “lucky” discovery was made with a ground-based telescope pointed at a single star using the wobble method, Borucki said. Planets exert a small gravitational tug on their stars, and the resulting wobble can tell scientists a little about the nature of a circling planet.
At Ball last week, a team of engineers paused before pushing a giant component of the Kepler spacecraft into a dust-free assembly room.
“There’s few opportunities in life to do something that people are going to reflect on as a major point in history,” said Ball engineer Brian Carter.
“That’s what we’re doing.”
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
