Post Kepler?

[Dryden88]

Hello,

I was just curious to read your thoughts. After Kepler is over, and lets say for arguments sake that it finds a lot of exoplanets and some of them are candidates for earth like conditions. What doy uo think we would do afterwards?

Will there be a massive launch of other Keplers to cover more area? I.E. Kepler was only staring at 100,000 of 1 billion stars.

Or will we make the decision to concentrate on all stars with 50-100 light years of us?

It would be smart of us to start thinking of what to do know.

I for one have the hope that Kepler will find many new exoplanets, many Earth size planets, and few planets in the habitable zone.

What do you think?

 

[Dryden88]

No one wants to discuss there thoughts on this?

 

[thnkrx]

Assuming the economy recovers (Kepler was nearly killed more than once due to money and bysantine bureaucratic problems) the next step would be something like the ''Terrestrial (sp?) Planet Finder', maybe combined with the 'Gaia' (Galactic Census) project (that was intended to provide distances and velocity info for something on the order of a billion stars, if memory serves).

All Kepler can really do is determin the size of the planet and its orbital period. Orbital eccentricity, which is very important, is beyond its capabilities, as is determining whether or not said world is actually habitable (earthlike).

The ground based planet hunting techniques are getting better all the time; a number of 'super earths' have already been found in such a manner and it is at least possible that the techniques can be improved enough to the point where 'normal' earth sized worlds could be found orbiting K and M dwarfs within a couple dozen lightyears. The new and improved Hubble Space Telescope might also be useful in extra solar planet detection or confirmation.

It is worth pointing out that COROT probably has discovered something on the order of several dozen (several hundred???) 'super earths' by now (or just maybe more or less earth sized planets with large moons like our own).

 

[centsworth_II]

Will there be a massive launch of other Keplers to cover more area?

Kepler will give us a good idea the ratio of earth-size planets to giant planets in any area of space. The next step should be designing a powerful telescope that will be able to analyze the atmospheres of the earth-size planets that Kepler does find. That should be the budgetary priority, not building more Keplers to repeat an experiment that has already been done.

 

[Dryden88]

What I meant by that comment was we are only surveying a very small portion of the sky. We have 100,000's of stars in our local neighborhood of 100 Light years (I am probably wrong). If we stop and use kepler's information then we only have information on I think les then one percent of our neighborhood. So wouldnt a survey of a wider area be a better idea?

 

[MeteorWayne]

If budgets were unlimited, sure!

But that's just not the real world. The question then becomes do you want to repeat the same experiment 10 or 15 years from now over a wider area, or use a new experiment to examine in detail some of what you learned.

If you do the first, then it will be 30 or 40 years before you get to try the second one.

I know, pragmatists are such a pain