Watch Live as NASA Makes Kepler Planet-Hunting Mission Announcement at 2:00PM EDT
Our guess: They're either announcing a lot more planets or one really, really interesting one.
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NASA is going to be making an announcement about the Kepler planet-hunting mission’s latest discovery. The Kepler telescope is being used to find potentially habitable planets. Our guess is they’ll be announcing new planets or one that happens to be very interesting. In this case interesting means habitable.
The details of the announcement will also be published in the journal Science, but not until after the announcement is made.
The panel on the announcement will include NASA exoplanet exploration program scientist Douglas Hudgins, Elisa Quintana from the SETI Institute, environmental research scientist Tom Barclay, and Victoria Meadows from the Virtual Planetary Laboratory. It sounds like a team you’d put together when you want to talk about a planet (or planets) with an interesting atmosphere.
Unfortunately this is just as likely to be very bad news considering Kepler’s recent reaction wheel failure. There was a workaround that allowed Kepler to continue its mission, but perhaps something else has gone wrong?
We’re just guessing of course. Let’s see what NASA has to say at 2:00PM.
(NASA via Space.com, image via NASA)
- We thought it was curtains for Kepler back in August
- But then NASA used photons from the Sun to balance it
- And then they announced more than 700 new planets
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