Death of NASA origins program

[kk434]

During Y2K Dan Goldin was in charge and he wanted to see an picture of an exo planet. Space Interferometry Mission, Terrestial Planet Finder, and other missions would use breaktrough tech to accomplish the task. Now all is canceled, terrible blow to the search for exo planets. COROT, Kepler they have not found any terrestial planets yet and propably wont.

 

[Valcan]

During Y2K Dan Goldin was in charge and he wanted to see an picture of an exo planet. Space Interferometry Mission, Terrestial Planet Finder, and other missions would use breaktrough tech to accomplish the task. Now all is canceled, terrible blow to the search for exo planets. COROT, Kepler they have not found any terrestial planets yet and propably wont.

Um what are you talking about we've found hundreds if not thousands of Exo planets. Granted most are giants but...

 

[SpaceTas]

Kepler is capable of detecting an earth size planet is an earth like orbit (1 year) but will require 3 years of data to do so. The first release is for 43 days. You need 3 transits (3 orbits) to be sure you have a planet. So most of the candidates just released will be for close in giants. By luck a single transit of a smaller farther out world may be in the list. Patience!
The problem with most of the candidates is that the host star is fairly faint so detailed follow-up will be difficult.

CoRoT uses much shorter stares at each target region 40 -90 days. This is due to it's orbit. It also has less sensitivity than Kepler. Because of these 2 factors it is unlikely to find an earth size planet especially one in a year long orbit.

The space interferometry mission is still being actively pursued but in a cut down version SIM-Lite. It may be given the go-ahead in the next couple of years. There are other planet finding missions being actively promoted, and may be chosen by either NASA or ESA. Beyond that there are several concepts under study. This is on-top-off a very active ground based effort in detecting and even getting spectra of some exo-planets. The technological development is being done.

What has been put on indefinite hold is the Terrestial Planet Finder. It was simply too ambitious in terms of technological development, risks and costs associated with that development. So the exo-planet hunting/studying community has settled on a path of slower step by step development. Sooner or later a planet imager + spectroscopy mission with capabilities similar to TPF will be needed. This will happen when we have a list of nearby earth mass planets. By then much of the tech will have been developed.