Maybe the Kepler Space Observatory can help you find your soul mate, too.
At a time when the media is busy reporting on everything from a global financial meltdown to the heated rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh, an event occurred this past week that two hundred years from now might be remembered as the most significant moment of 2009.
We’re speaking of NASA’s launch late Friday night of a new space based observatory called Kepler, which is the world’s first mission to find other Earth like planets that orbit stars like our sun in the “habitable zone.” The habitable zone is the region around a star where the temperature is just right for water, the essential ingredient for life as we know it.
Why is this important to Martians and Venusians living on planet Earth in the 21st Century?
Because it is the most significant step we have ever taken as citizens of planet Earth to learn if our host planet is utterly unique or quite common in this vast universe we inhabit.
It changes us fundamentally to know that we are or we are not alone in the cosmos even if our ability to buzz about our galaxy, a la Star Trek, is a reality in a hundred or a thousand years from today.
First a little history: Johannes Kepler, born in 1571, was a German mathematician. In addition to supporting the observation of Galileo that the Earth orbited the sun and not the other way around, Kepler created a formula that proved that a planet’s rate of motion is inversely proportional to its distance from the Sun. It is because of his breakthrough work (Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion) in revealing how we can identify and measure the orbit of a planet around its star that this space observatory bears his name.
The Kepler telescope will orbit the sun as opposed to orbiting the Earth as the Hubble space telescope does. It will trail Earth by 950 miles and from that perch observe simultaneously a swath of approximately 100,000 stars, one small slice of our own Milky Way galaxy. Its mission will last 3.5 years, or more, and it carries the most powerful digital camera ever sent into space. How sensitive is Kepler’s light detecting ability? It could detect one person in a small town turning off a porch light at night.
As for the 100,000 stars it will observe, it should give us a realistic idea of just how unique we are to the universe. If all we could observe at one time would be ten, a hundred, or even a thousand stars, one could argue that the sample size was not large enough. But with Kepler studying 100,000 stars, we should have a reasonable idea, by the year 2012, if all goes well, of just how common earth like planets are in the scheme of things.
Eighty years ago our knowledge of the universe was limited to the existence of our own Milky Way galaxy. Today we know that there are probably more than 100 billion galaxies, trillions of stars, and an unimaginable number of planets. Is all this hopeful, or terrifying, to the Martians and Venusians that inhabit planet Earth?
One would hope that it fills us all with a sense of wonder and awe. Perhaps somewhere out there are beings that have reasoned out how to form more perfect unions, to care and nurture each other and their planet. Maybe by the time we have figured out how to visit one of these distant planets, we will have made our tiny spot in the universe a far better place as well.
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