The Kepler spacecraft roared into space Friday night from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to search for habitable planets in the galaxy, and at a control panel in a Boulder lab two University of Colorado students began the search too.
Once Kepler attained orbit, NASA handed off control to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU before 10:30 p.m.
Laura Bush, 23, and Matt Lenda, 22, both trained satellite operators, sat at the lab’s console, beginning a grueling 60-day, round-the-clock process of checking out and powering-up Kepler.
The lab’s 20 student operators, backed up by 16 professional controllers, will be working in four-hour shifts.
“No life for the next two months,” said Bush, an aerospace graduate student who as a child dreamed of being an astronaut. “But there will be free food and that’s always a big thing for a student.”
“This is definitely the coolest thing,” Lenda said.
The entire team of student operators and professional satellite controllers went through extensive rehearsals for Kepler, Lenda said.
“In space operations, boring is good. You want boring,” he said.
In a nearby control room was a crew from Boulder-based Ball Aerospace Technologies Corp., which built the $508 million spacecraft and will help manage the craft as it scans the galaxy for Earthlike planets.
“We are looking for Goldilocks planets, not too hot, not too cold and just the right size,” said William Borucki, the mission’s NASA chief scientist.
The challenge for Kepler — named for Johannes Kepler, the 17th-century astronomer who developed laws of planetary motion — is detecting faint flickers of light on the faces of stars far, far away.
The mission will pick out stars similar to our sun and then use a 15-foot-long telescope attached to a big mirror and the biggest digital camera ever sent into space to look for tiny blips tracking across the stars.
“It is like looking at a highway a mile away with thousands of headlights and trying to see a gnat slowly crossing one headlight,” Borucki said.
The key to the search is the digital camera developed by Ball.
While the average consumer camera is 8 megapixels, the Kepler camera is 95 megapixels, with a face that is 18 inches by 18 inches, said John Troeltzsch, Ball’s Kepler program manager.
Unlike the other satellites the CU lab handles — which are looking at clouds, oceans, sea ice and the sun — Kepler will not be in an Earth orbit.
To stare continually at distant stars without the Earth or other planets getting in the way, Kepler, which was launched on a rocket from Centennial-based United Launch Alliance, will be in a trailing orbit — a little dinghy far behind the Earth.
“We aren’t looking for ET,” said Borucki. “We are looking for ET’s home.”
That’s what James Binney, 20, a junior aerospace major, who is scheduled to take the console at noon today, is hoping for.
“Someday I may be able to tell my kids and grandkids that I was part of the team that discovered an inhabitable planet,” Binney said.
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912 or mjaffe@denverpost.com
