Proba-2 tracks Comet Lovejoy through Sun’s fiery corona

ESA - PROBA-2 Mission logo.

22 December 2011

 Comet Lovejoy's passage round the Sun

ESA’s Proba-2 micro-satellite joined a flotilla of spacecraft observing deep-frozen Comet Lovejoy’s plunge through the million degree corona enshrouding the Sun, providing a close-up extreme ultraviolet view of the comet passing just 120 000 km from the Sun’s surface – and then, surprisingly, surviving.

Lovejoy had not been predicted to endure its swing by the Sun, but is now headed back out to the colder outer reaches of the Solar System, and should be visible from Earth’s northern hemisphere in mid-January.

Proba-2’s SWAP imager took part in a coordinated effort to track Comet Lovejoy as it came closest to the Sun on 16 December, working along with the ESA/NASA SOHO solar watchdog, Japan’s Hinode mission, NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft and its Solar Dynamics Observatory.

SWAP showed the comet as a bright streak in the solar corona, with interactions between the comet tail causing brief coronal brightening and wiggles in the comet’s tale. This was only the second time ever that a comet has been observed through an extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) solar telescope. The instrument’s observations – interrupted briefly as Proba-2 crossed behind Earth – show the comet going behind the Sun and then emerging back into view from the other side.

Comet Lovejoy seen by SOHO

Comets are drawn to the gravitational pull of the Sun like moths to a flame – SOHO has identified thousands of Sun-grazing comets over the last 16 years. But up until now, what happens when a comet draws closest to the Sun has been a mystery.

Comets in the Sun’s neighbourhood usually seen with ‘coronagraph’ telescopes that block out the bright solar disc to observe the faint solar corona they are tuned for. This makes detailed images of comets nearing the Sun very hard to obtain.

It turns out however that EUV imagers that detect the extreme ultraviolet corona from the solar disk can also show the comet. Since the dust and other material making up a comet’s tail do not radiate at EUV wavelengths, this came as a surprise.

Proba-2

As comets are so dim compared to the radiance of the Sun and its corona, the Proba-2 team made a careful calculation of the comet’s path to know where to look, and performed careful processing to make the comet stand out from the bright coronal plasma.

A comet’s tail is formed by the outgoing solar wind, leading it to always point away from the Sun. The Proba-2 images show this tail wobbling, possibly due to localised gusts of solar wind blowing the tail at different speeds near the Sun.

About Comet Lovejoy

Comet Lovejoy is one of a family of comets called Kreutz sun-grazer comets. These are all part of a cloud of debris left over from one large comet that previously broke apart. These comets share an elliptical orbit around the Sun, part of which takes them close enough that many smaller comets don’t survive (unlike Comet Lovejoy).

About Proba-2’s SWAP

Proba-2 is a technology demonstration mission that also hosts scientific instruments, including the Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing, SWAP, operated by the Royal Observatory of Belgium. SWAP observes the solar corona, whose outer layers are almost invisible to the naked eye because they radiate in ultraviolet and EUV. SWAP converts EUV to a visible picture, acquiring a new image around once per minute.

Related links:

ROB Proba-2 science centre: http://proba2.sidc.be/index.html/

Proba: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Proba/index.html

SOHO overview: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120373_index_0_m.html

Images, Video, Text, Credits: ESA /Pierre Carril / ROB / SOHO / LASCO (ESA/NASA).

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

Dawn Obtains First Low Altitude Images of Vesta

NASA - Dawn Mission patch.

Dec. 22, 2011

Images above: NASA's Dawn spacecraft has spiraled closer and closer to the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has sent back the first images of the giant asteroid Vesta from its low-altitude mapping orbit. The images, obtained by the framing camera, show the stippled and lumpy surface in detail never seen before, piquing the curiosity of scientists who are studying Vesta for clues about the solar system's early history.

At this detailed resolution, the surface shows abundant small craters, and textures such as small grooves and lineaments that are reminiscent of the structures seen in low-resolution data from the higher-altitude orbits. Also, this fine scale highlights small outcrops of bright and dark material.

This image, one of the first obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in its low altitude mapping orbit, shows an area within the Rheasilvia basin in the south polar area of the giant asteroid Vesta. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA.

A gallery of images can be found online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/gallery-index.html

The images were returned to Earth on Dec. 13. Dawn scientists plan to acquire data in the low-altitude mapping orbit for at least 10 weeks. The primary science objectives in this orbit are to learn about the elemental composition of Vesta's surface with the gamma ray and neutron detector and to probe the interior structure of the asteroid by measuring the gravity field.

This image, one of the first obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in its low altitude mapping orbit, shows a part of one of the troughs at the equator of the giant asteroid Vesta. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech/ UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA.

The Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn Framing Cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA / JPL.

More information about the Dawn mission is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

Images (mentioned), Text, Credit: NASA / JPL / Jia-Rui Cook.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA Conducts Orion Parachute Testing For Orbital Test Flight

NASA - MPCV Orion logo.

Dec. 21, 2011

NASA successfully conducted a drop test of the Orion crew vehicle's parachutes high above the Arizona desert Tuesday in preparation for its orbital flight test in 2014. Orion will carry astronauts deeper into space than ever before, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel and ensure a safe re-entry and landing.

A C-130 plane dropped the Orion test article from an altitude of 25,000 feet above the U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Grounds. Orion's drogue chutes were deployed between 15,000 and 20,000 feet, followed by the pilot parachutes, which then deployed two main landing parachutes. This particular drop test examined how Orion would land under two possible failure scenarios.

Orion's parachutes are designed to open in stages, which is called reefing, to manage the stresses on the parachutes after they are deployed. The reefing stages allow the parachutes to sequentially open, first at 54 percent of the parachutes' full diameter, and then at 73 percent. This test examined how the parachutes would perform if the second part of the sequence was skipped.

The second scenario was a failure to deploy one of Orion's three main parachutes, requiring the spacecraft to land with only two. Orion landed on the desert floor at a speed of almost 33 feet per second, which is the maximum designed touchdown speed of the spacecraft.

Since 2007, the Orion program has conducted a vigorous parachute air and ground test program and provided the chutes for NASA's successful pad abort test in 2010. Lessons learned from this experience have improved Orion's parachute system.

For images of the drop test, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/mpcv/gallery/parachute_testing/orion_test_drop.html.

For more about Orion, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/orion

Images, Text, Credit: NASA.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

INTEGRAL deciphers diffuse signature of cosmic-ray electrons

ESA - INTEGRAL Mission patch.

21 Dec 2011

Astronomers exploiting six years worth of data from ESA's INTEGRAL mission have pinned down the individual processes contributing to the high-energy Galactic interstellar emission produced by cosmic-ray electrons. Deciphering each of the different physical mechanisms at play at hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray wavelengths represents a crucial step towards an increasingly detailed picture of the population of high-energy particles permeating the Milky Way.

Cosmic rays are highly-energetic charged particles that pervade galaxies, including our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, and can also escape from them and travel across intergalactic space. They are important players in regulating global galactic properties such as the heating balance and the total energy budget, and have been subject to intense investigation ever since their discovery in 1912.

The hard X-ray sky as seen with INTEGRAL / SPI. Credits: ESA / INTEGRAL / SPI

Researchers study these particles either directly, by detecting the tracks that arise from collisions with material in the Earth's atmosphere, or indirectly, by tracing the radiation emitted when cosmic rays interact with different components of a galaxy – for example, other particles, photons, magnetic fields. In the Milky Way, these phenomena are among the primary sources of the distinctive 'diffuse' emission that is seen along the Galactic Plane, at both the low energy (radio, microwave) and high energy (hard X-ray, gamma ray) ends of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This 'glow' is due to a combination of many different processes. Extensive observations across many wavelengths, as well as detailed physical modelling, are required to disentangle all contributions and to help solve the puzzle of the charged particles that fill our Galaxy.

"The diffuse emission at hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray wavelengths is an excellent tracer of cosmic-ray electrons and their antiparticles, the positrons, a minor but very significant fraction of the high-energy particle population in the Milky Way," explains Laurent Bouchet from Université de Toulouse and Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in France. Bouchet and his international team exploited data from ESA's INTEGRAL mission, probing the entire sky at energies between 20 keV and 2.4 MeV. Exploring the diffuse emission in this energy range is one of the main science goals of the INTEGRAL mission, and after almost a decade of operation the mission has finally achieved the unprecedented sensitivity required to push this inquiry to the next level.

The study conducted by Bouchet and his collaborators relies on data collected with the Spectrometer on board INTEGRAL (SPI) over a time span of six years. "Such a long exposure allowed us to isolate, with very high precision, the different physical processes that account for the total emission in the spectral window probed by INTEGRAL," he adds.

The first step in the complex analysis performed by the team consists of a careful scrutiny of the data to remove all point sources, both galactic and extragalactic, that radiate at these wavelengths. In this context, point sources represent a contamination of the diffuse signal produced by cosmic rays. "We have identified a few hundred sources across the entire sky and established that their contribution is dominant at the lowest energies examined in this work, between 20 and 100 keV," notes Bouchet. After point-source removal, the observed diffuse emission was compared with model predictions, in order to break it down into the individual physical processes that contribute to it.

Graphic above: Different contributions to the total emission at hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray energies, as measured with INTEGRAL/SPI. Courtesy of L. Bouchet (Univ. Toulouse and IRAP).

"Interestingly, we found a major contribution due to Inverse Compton (IC) scattering, thus confirming what early INTEGRAL data had hinted at a few years ago," comments Andrew Strong from the Max-Planck Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE) in Germany. IC scattering consists of collisions between highly energetic electrons (or positrons) and low-energy photons present in interstellar space, which result in the electrons transferring part of their energy to the photons, thus 'boosting' them to X- and gamma-ray wavelengths. Cosmic-ray electrons interact via IC scattering with infrared and visible photons emitted by stars, and with the ubiquitous photons of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The team made use of a very detailed model of the interstellar radiation field in the inner part of the Galaxy, a crucial ingredient to be taken into account in order to achieve a thorough physical interpretation of the observed emission. "Together with the latest models and improved data analysis techniques, the new INTEGRAL data allowed us to unequivocally identify IC scattering as the principal mechanism producing diffuse emission between 100 and 200 keV, as well as between 600 keV and 2 MeV," adds Strong.

Besides the clear feature of IC scattering, the data also exhibit the well studied signatures of other emission processes arising in this spectral band – the annihilation of positrons with electrons and the radioactive decay of some unstable atomic nuclei. When positrons and electrons collide, two things may happen: they may destroy each other immediately, releasing a pair of photons each with an energy of 511 keV; alternatively, they may create an unstable and short-lived two-particle system called positronium, which soon decays into two or more photons, producing a distinctive continuum emission spectrum up to 511 keV. At energies above 1 MeV, the data also exhibit characteristic decay features of two unstable isotopes of aluminium (26Al) and iron (60Fe). This indicates the presence of these radioactive nuclei - the products of recent nucleosynthesis in supernova explosions - throughout the diffuse interstellar medium of the Milky Way.

"In addition to these mechanisms, the data require a further component to be taken into account at low energies, below 50 keV," notes Bouchet. "This is most likely due to the superposition of many unresolved faint sources, as pointed out by previous studies based on data from the IBIS imager on board INTEGRAL," he adds. Stars with very hot coronae and cataclysmic variable stars are the main objects contributing to this unresolved emission.

Artist's impression of Integral. Credit: ESA

The study of Bouchet and collaborators enabled models of cosmic ray propagation to be tested in this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in greater detail than previously possible. "The data demonstrate that our current understanding of the properties of cosmic-ray electrons in the Milky Way is qualitatively correct," notes Strong. As INTEGRAL keeps scanning the high-energy sky, even longer exposures will be available in the future. "With more data and improved analysis methodology, we plan to explore quantitatively the distribution of cosmic-ray electrons across the Galaxy, narrowing down important parameters such as the size of the Galactic region within which the particles are confined," he adds.

Ultimately, it is essential to verify that the data fit well within the physical scenario suggested by other observations. In particular, there is a consensus on the general picture provided by both INTEGRAL and the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Sensitive to gamma rays between 20 MeV and 300 GeV, Fermi-LAT observes the sky at higher energies than INTEGRAL, and the agreement reached by these two complementary missions is very encouraging.

"This long-awaited result showcases INTEGRAL's uniqueness in probing such a crucial spectral window," comments Chris Winkler, INTEGRAL Project Scientist at ESA. "The large amount of data accumulated by INTEGRAL is now revealing the mission's full potential for exciting results and discoveries."

Notes for editors:

The study presented here is based on observations performed with the Spectrometer on board INTEGRAL (SPI) between 22 February 2003 and 2 January 2009. The data probe the entire sky at energies between 20 keV and 2.4 MeV.

The data were compared to model predictions obtained with GALPROP, a publicly available code for calculating the propagation of cosmic-ray nuclei, antiprotons, electrons and positrons. The code also computes diffuse gamma-ray and synchrotron emission resulting from the cosmic rays. The first version of GALPROP was developed in the mid-1990s by Andrew W. Strong (MPE, Germany) and Igor V. Moskalenko (Stanford University, USA), both co-authors of the paper presented here. The code is currently maintained by a small team of researchers. In particular, GALPROP includes the most advanced model presently available of the interstellar radiation in the inner Galaxy, which has been developed by Troy A. Porter (Stanford University, USA), who is also a co-author of the paper presented here.

INTEGRAL is an ESA project with instruments and science data centre funded by ESA Member States (especially the Principal Investigator countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland) and Poland, and with the participation of Russia and the USA.

Related publications:

L. Bouchet, et al., "Diffuse Emission Measurement with the SPectrometer on Integral as an Indirect Probe of Cosmic-ray Electrons and Positrons", 2011, The Astrophysical Journal, 739, 29.

For more information about INTEGRAL, visit: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=21

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: Université de Toulouse and Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP), Laurent Bouchet / Max-Planck Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), Andrew W. Strong / INTEGRAL Project Scientist Research and Scientific Support Department Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration ESA, Chris Winkler.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Launch of manned spacecraft Soyuz TMA-03M

ROSCOSMOS - Soyuz TMA-03M Mission patch.

12/21/2011

 Soyuz TMA-03M on a launch pad

December 21 at 17.16.15 GMT on a launch pad site Baikonur was put space rocket (ILV) Soyuz-FG with transport manned spacecraft (TLC) Soyuz TMA-03M (Commander Oleg Kononenko (Roscosmos), flight engineers Andre Kuipers (ESA) and Donald Pettit (NASA)).

Image above: The crew headed for the elevator, commander Oleg Kononenko, flight engineers, astronauts ship Andre Kuipers (ESA) and Donald Pettit (NASA) will take their places in the ship.

Soyuz TMA-03M Launch

After 528 seconds of flight rocket TPK Soyuz TMA-03M cleanly separated from the third stage to orbit an artificial satellite.

Soyuz TMA manned transport spacecraft cutaway

Docking of the Soyuz TMA-03M to the International Space Station is scheduled for December 23 this year at 19:22 Moscow time (10:22 a.m. EST on Friday).

Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin will welcome their new crewmates aboard the station a little while later when they open the hatches about 1 p.m.

Pettit, Kononenko and Kuipers are scheduled to live and work aboard the orbiting laboratory until May. They will become members of the Expedition 31 crew under the command of Kononenko when Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin undock in their Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft in March.

Read more about Expedition 30: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/index.html

Send a holiday postcard to the station crew: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/postcard/

More information about the International Space Station (ISS), visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Original text in Russian: http://www.federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=18481

Images, Video, Text, Credits: Press Service of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos PAO) / Roscosmos TV / NASA / NASA TV / Translation: Orbiter.ch.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

A Chinese Long March 3B rocket launch the Nigcomsat 1R satellite for Nigeria

CNSA - China National Space Administration logo.

Dec. 20, 2011

China launched a massive Nigerian communications satellite Monday to link Africans with television programming, education services and navigation signals.

Warning! This video has inaudible sound, turn off your speaker!

Long March 3B rocket launch the Nigcomsat 1R

Liftoff occurred at about 16:41 GMT (11:41 a.m. EST) Monday, or just after midnight Beijing time on Tuesday.

Manufactured by the China Academy of Space Technology, the Nigcomsat 1R satellite will replace a craft that lost power and failed in November 2008, less than 18 months after its launch on a Chinese rocket.

Long March 3B rocket launch

Nigcomsat Ltd., a company chartered by the Nigerian government, will operate the satellite for up to 15 years.

Nigcomsat 1R "will provide optimal and cost effective voice, data, video, Internet and application services solutions," the satellite's operator said.

 Logo of the satellite on the rocket fairing

An 18-story Long March 3B rocket will streak into space from the Xichang launch base in Sichuan province in southwestern China.

The three-stage rocket, boosted off the launch pad by four strap-on engines, will reach orbit 10 minutes into the mission. The rocket's hydrogen-fueled third stage will ignite a second time to place Nigcomsat 1R in an an oval-shaped transfer orbit with a low point of 124 miles, a high point of 26,092 miles and an inclination of 24.8 degrees, according to China Great Wall Industry Corp., the state-owned commercial sales firm for the Long March rocket family.

Separation of the 11,243-pound satellite is scheduled less than 26 minutes after liftoff. Nigcomsat 1R will ultimately be positioned in geosynchronous orbit over the equator at 42.5 degrees east longitude.

Nigcomsat 1R satellite

Nigcomsat 1R is based on China's DFH-4 spacecraft platform. China has reached agreements to build DFH-4 communications satellites for several non-traditional players in the space industry, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Venezuela, Laos and Bolivia.

Nigcomsat 1R's communications package includes 28 active transponders and seven antennas reaching across sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Central Asia.

For more information about China National Space Administration (CNSA), visit: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/n615709/cindex.html

Images, Video, Text, Credits: CNSA / CASC / CGWIC / ITN TV / AFP / Orbiter.ch.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA Discovers First Earth-Size Planets Beyond Our Solar System

NASA - Kepler Mission patch.

Dec. 20, 2011

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface, but they are the smallest exoplanets ever confirmed around a star like our sun.

The discovery marks the next important milestone in the ultimate search for planets like Earth. The new planets are thought to be rocky. Kepler-20e is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring 0.87 times the radius of Earth. Kepler-20f is slightly larger than Earth, measuring 1.03 times its radius. Both planets reside in a five-planet system called Kepler-20, approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.

This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-20e. Image credit: NASA / Ames / JPL-Caltech

Kepler-20e orbits its parent star every 6.1 days and Kepler-20f every 19.6 days. These short orbital periods mean very hot, inhospitable worlds. Kepler-20f, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, is similar to an average day on the planet Mercury. The surface temperature of Kepler-20e, at more than 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, would melt glass.

“The primary goal of the Kepler mission is to find Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone," said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature. "This discovery demonstrates for the first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars, and that we are able to detect them.”

This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-20f. Image credit: NASA / Ames / JPL-Caltech

The Kepler-20 system includes three other planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Kepler-20b, the closest planet, Kepler-20c, the third planet, and Kepler-20d, the fifth planet, orbit their star every 3.7, 10.9 and 77.6 days. All five planets have orbits lying roughly within Mercury's orbit in our solar system. The host star belongs to the same G-type class as our sun, although it is slightly smaller and cooler.

The system has an unexpected arrangement. In our solar system, small, rocky worlds orbit close to the sun and large, gaseous worlds orbit farther out. In comparison, the planets of Kepler-20 are organized in alternating size: large, small, large, small and large.

"The Kepler data are showing us some planetary systems have arrangements of planets very different from that seen in our solar system," said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist and Kepler science team member at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The analysis of Kepler data continue to reveal new insights about the diversity of planets and planetary systems within our galaxy."

This chart compares artist's concept images of the first Earth-size planets found around a sun-like star to planets in our own solar system, Earth and Venus. Image credit: NASA / Ames / JPL-Caltech.

Scientists are not certain how the system evolved but they do not think the planets formed in their existing locations. They theorize the planets formed farther from their star and then migrated inward, likely through interactions with the disk of material from which they originated. This allowed the worlds to maintain their regular spacing despite alternating sizes.

The Kepler space telescope detects planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets crossing in front, or transiting, their stars. The Kepler science team requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.

This artist's animation flies through the Kepler-20 star system, where NASA's Kepler mission discovered the first Earth-size planets around a star beyond our own. Animation credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech.

The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope to review observations on planet candidates the spacecraft finds. The star field Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can be seen only from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations help determine which candidates can be validated as planets.

To validate Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, astronomers used a computer program called Blender, which runs simulations to help rule out other astrophysical phenomena masquerading as a planet.

On Dec. 5 the team announced the discovery of Kepler-22b in the habitable zone of its parent star. It is likely to be too large to have a rocky surface. While Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f are Earth-size, they are too close to their parent star to have liquid water on the surface.

"In the cosmic game of hide and seek, finding planets with just the right size and just the right temperature seems only a matter of time," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead and professor of astronomy and physics at San Jose State University. "We are on the edge of our seats knowing that Kepler's most anticipated discoveries are still to come."

For more information about the Kepler mission and to view the digital press kit, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credit: NASA Ames Research Center, Michele Johnson.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch