http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (PhysOrg.com) -- At the May 23 press event, held at the 218th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boston, the Kepler team provided a progress report on the mission. How is Kepler performing while trailing Earth around the sun? http://phys.org/news227779350.html Space & Earth Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:02:48 EST news227779350 A European freighter will be destroyed by atmospheric burn-up next week after completing its supply mission to mankind's orbital outpost, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday. http://phys.org/news227532291.html Space & Earth Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:25:05 EST news227532291 All around the world - from the deep gold mines of South Africa to the far-seeing telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, from the frigid glaciers of Antarctica to the halls of the world's best universities and research institutions - scientists are on a quest unlike anything we've seen before. Tens of thousands of researchers are involved in the effort, one which three years of reporting has convinced me will be - or certainly could be - the big idea of our era. http://phys.org/news226725082.html Space & Earth Wed, 08 Jun 2011 06:20:01 EST news226725082 The Kepler Telescope team has announced a second planet orbiting the star Kepler-10. The existence of this planet was suspected previously, but new analytical techniques were needed to confirm its existence. http://phys.org/news225617209.html Space & Earth Thu, 26 May 2011 08:27:20 EST news225617209 The fourth of Europe's robot freighters, due to be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in early 2013, has been named after Albert Einstein, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday. http://phys.org/news225616162.html Space & Earth Thu, 26 May 2011 08:09:39 EST news225616162 (PhysOrg.com) -- For many movie stars, their age is a well-kept secret. In space, the same is true of the actual stars. Like our Sun, most stars look almost the same for most of their lives. So how can we tell if a star is one billion or 10 billion years old? Astronomers may have found a solution - measuring the star's spin. http://phys.org/news225451523.html Space & Earth Tue, 24 May 2011 10:25:40 EST news225451523 (PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Kepler spacecraft is proving itself to be a prolific planet hunter. Within just the first four months of data, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system. http://phys.org/news225451430.html Space & Earth Tue, 24 May 2011 10:24:27 EST news225451430 (PhysOrg.com) -- UC Berkeley is searching for evidence of intelligent life on planets identified by the Kepler space telescope team as having Earth-like environments. This search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) uses the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and targets 86 stars with possible planetary systems. http://phys.org/news224750472.html Space & Earth Mon, 16 May 2011 08:20:01 EST news224750472 The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia counted 548 confirmed extrasolar planets at 6 May 2011, while the NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (updated weekly) was today reporting 535. These are confirmed findings and the counts will significantly increase as more candidate exoplanets are assessed. For example, there were the 1,235 candidates announced by the Kepler mission in February, including 54 that may be in a habitable zone. http://phys.org/news224157295.html Space & Earth Mon, 09 May 2011 11:20:01 EST news224157295 (PhysOrg.com) -- During a regularly scheduled science data download on Tuesday, April 26, the project team reoriented the Kepler spacecraft to downlink data from its solid-state recorder (SSR). All data collected since March 20 was returned successfully. The Quarter 9, Month 1 science data collection download now is complete. http://phys.org/news223894505.html Space & Earth Fri, 06 May 2011 09:55:24 EST news223894505 We are entering a golden era for "stellar physics" – a term coined to describe research about the formation, evolution, interior and the atmospheres of stars. Thanks to a partnership forged among stellar astrophysics, scientists and NASA’s Kepler Mission, a goldmine of data is now available to support the world's efforts to detect planets in the habitable zone around other stars. http://phys.org/news221909838.html Space & Earth Wed, 13 Apr 2011 10:37:51 EST news221909838 Wow. This remarkable visualization shows every Kepler planetary candidate host star with its transiting companion in silhouette. Jason Rowe from the Kepler science team created the image, and the sizes of the stars and transiting companions are properly scaled. http://phys.org/news220710703.html Space & Earth Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:32:15 EST news220710703 NASA's Kepler Mission is giving astronomers such a clear view of changes in star brightness that they can now see clues about what's happening inside red giant stars. http://phys.org/news220709019.html Space & Earth Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:04:01 EST news220709019 After a safe mode event that lasted 144 hours, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft returned to science data collection at 2:45 p.m. EDT Sunday, March 20. http://phys.org/news220113467.html Space & Earth Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:38:03 EST news220113467 (PhysOrg.com) -- Today an international team of astronomers reports the discovery of waves inside a star that travel so deep that they reach the core. The discovery was published in the renowned journal Science, and was possible thanks to precise measurements with the Kepler space telescope. http://phys.org/news219659892.html Space & Earth Fri, 18 Mar 2011 09:46:25 EST news219659892 (PhysOrg.com) -- The Kepler project team had an exciting month in February. Besides recovering the spacecraft from a Safe Mode event, the team released Kepler’s Quarter 2 science data to the public on Feb. 1. The press conference on Feb. 2, announcing the 1,235 planet candidates and the Kepler-11 system, drew the attention of major national and international news outlets. More than 1,150 news media outlets published or aired stories following the announcement. On Feb. 11, NASA Ames Research Center held its first Tweetup. Traveling from five countries and 18 U.S. states, 60 attendees, or ‘tweeps’ as they are affectionately known, donned their mobile devices to participate in the Planet Hunting Tweetup. The attendees were treated to a rare opportunity to tour the labs at NASA Ames, listen to presentations and have their questions answered by researchers who work at the center. All the while, sharing their experience real-time with nearly 1,000 tweets, Facebook posts, check-ins, and video and photo blogs. http://phys.org/news219312950.html Space & Earth Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:15:59 EST news219312950 A robot freighter laden with seven tonnes of supplies docked flawlessly on Thursday with the International Space Station (ISS), its European controllers said here. http://phys.org/news217766220.html Space & Earth Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:54:46 EST news217766220 (PhysOrg.com) -- The search for planets outside our solar system continues to heat up. NASA's Kepler spacecraft has located more than 1,200 planetary candidates, however confirming them remains a challenge. In some circumstances, an eclipsing binary star can mimic the shallow dimming due to a planet crossing in front of its star. Ground-based measurements are needed to verify an orbiting world by spotting the gravitational wobbles it induces in its host star, in a method known as radial velocity. http://phys.org/news217003052.html Space & Earth Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:37:46 EST news217003052 (PhysOrg.com) -- The Kepler project team has recovered spacecraft from its Safe Mode event that occurred on Feb. 1, 2011. http://phys.org/news216373244.html Space & Earth Tue, 08 Feb 2011 07:40:53 EST news216373244 NASA’s Kepler -- an orbiting, planet-finding telescope launched in 2009 -- has dramatically increased the discovery rate of planets around stars other than the sun, known as exoplanets. Before Kepler, there were a total of about 520 known exoplanets, but last year the Kepler team announced 700 new exoplanet "candidates," and this week they unveiled about 500 more. About 60 to 80 percent of these 1,200 Kepler candidates are considered likely to be real planets, and the new trove includes a number of surprising features. http://phys.org/news216039196.html Space & Earth Fri, 04 Feb 2011 10:54:03 EST news216039196 (PhysOrg.com) -- A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their coauthors analyzed the orbital dynamics of the system, determined the sizes and masses of the planets, and figured out their likely compositions--all based on Kepler's measurements of the changing brightness of the host star (called Kepler-11) as the planets passed in front of it. http://phys.org/news215876339.html Space & Earth Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:39:21 EST news215876339 An orbiting NASA telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life, including more than 50 potential planets that appear to be in the habitable zone. http://phys.org/news215844987.html Space & Earth Wed, 02 Feb 2011 04:57:17 EST news215844987 After Ariane 5 lofts ATV Johannes Kepler into space on 15 February, ESA’s Artemis data relay satellite will be ready for action. http://phys.org/news215348136.html Space & Earth Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:55:54 EST news215348136 (PhysOrg.com) -- NASA has spotted a tiny, rocky planet about the size of Earth doing a speedy orbit of a star outside our solar system, but its scorching temperatures are too hot for life, the space agency said Monday. http://phys.org/news213900926.html Space & Earth Mon, 10 Jan 2011 16:55:47 EST news213900926 The Kepler Project Team successfully returned the spacecraft to normal operations on Jan. 6, 2011. The team determined the condition was caused by unexpected noise in the signal from Kepler's sun sensors that erroneously indicated Kepler might be pointing too close to the sun. This was a false alarm, but the team treated it seriously. http://phys.org/news213881635.html Space & Earth Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:00:01 EST news213881635 (PhysOrg.com) -- There are now about fifty stars known with more than one orbiting planet - they are the exoplanetary equivalents of the solar system. These stellar families are critical to astronomers piecing together the origin and evolution of the Earth because, among other things, they shed new light on the stability of multiple-planet systems and how the planets interact with each other. http://phys.org/news213622697.html Space & Earth Fri, 07 Jan 2011 11:39:29 EST news213622697 In response to the Dec. 22, 2010 Safe Mode event on the Kepler spacecraft, the mission team has brought in several experts and begun a detailed anomaly investigation. http://phys.org/news213361279.html Space & Earth Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:20:01 EST news213361279 On Dec. 22, 2010, Kepler experienced a safe mode event. A safe mode is a self-protective measure that the spacecraft takes when something unexpected occurs. During safe mode, the spacecraft points the solar panels directly at the sun and begins to slowly rotate about a sun-aligned axis. This safe mode orientation provides the vehicle with the maximum power, and limits the buildup of momentum from the solar wind. http://phys.org/news212320474.html Space & Earth Thu, 23 Dec 2010 09:54:47 EST news212320474 (PhysOrg.com) -- An international cadre of scientists that used data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft announced Tuesday the detection of stellar oscillations, or "starquakes," that yield new insights about the size, age and evolution of stars. http://phys.org/news207321214.html Space & Earth Tue, 26 Oct 2010 14:14:06 EST news207321214 The quantity and quality of data coming back from NASA's Kepler Mission is changing how astronomers study stars, said Iowa State University's Steve Kawaler. http://phys.org/news207311286.html Space & Earth Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:40:06 EST news207311286