NASA to Reveal Big News From Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Thursday

Vatic Note:  One thing we have to admit without a doubt,  we live in interesting times that we have chosen to come into.   Thats not only on this planet but in the outerspace arena.  Also in the "inner space" area,  such as dimensional levels, time, and energy that is relatively unknown right now by the average person, however, science is making great progress and steps in discovery in these realms of reality and existance, so we hope to keep you abreast of all of it.    That includes all the news about Planet X which we are currently researching and hope to be able to give you some very credible information on that aspect of the news...  NASA will be making their announcement today, thursday and we will watch for it and update this blog as news comes in for those of you with an interest in this subject.  

NASA to Reveal Big News From Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Thursday

By Denise Chow
SPACE.com Staff Writer
posted: 23 August 2010, 04:56 pm ET

 NASA is expected to make an announcement Thursday on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of space for evidence of other worlds.

The space agency has scheduled an afternoon teleconference with reporters to announce the results from Kepler, which include the "discovery of an intriguing planetary system," NASA officials said Monday.


Participating in the teleconference will be senior NASA scientists and Kepler mission researchers, including principal investigator William Borucki, at the space agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.


The Kepler space observatory hunts for Earth-like planets around other stars. In June, mission scientists announced it had found over 700 candidates, including five systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet.


The spacecraft monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate that alien planets are passing in front of them as seen from Earth. To date, astronomers have discovered more than 400 planets lurking around stars beyond our solar system.



Astronomers have been using the data from Kepler to determine whether orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.

Follow-up observations are necessary to distinguish between actual planets and false alarms such as binary stars, which are two stars that orbit each other.

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The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. NASA launched the $600 million spacecraft in March 2009. It is currently staring at a patch of the Milky Way that contains over 156,000 stars – a star field in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.