Kepler, the largest spherical mirror in orbit

Kepler's astronomical mirror has just been transferred to the Ball Aerospace Group (USA) to conduct a series of tests before installing it on satellites. With a diameter of 1.4 m, this is the largest optical mirror that will be launched into orbit.

Kepler's 1.4 m primary mirror.(Photo: flashespace) Kepler is the first astronomical satellite to detect strange planets like Earth or smaller; Discover planets of stars, life formation. Kepler's vision is 70 thousand times larger than the Hubble telescope.

The launch of Kepler is expected in October 2007, with Boeing's Delta II boosters, postponed until June 2008. This telescope will work for at least four years and observe about 100,000 stars.

To date, astronomers have explored about 150 giant gas masses in the universe, similar in size or larger than Jupiter.

For Kepler, astronomers expect to discover 500 Earth-like strange planets, that is, Earth-sized and earth-like, and nearly 1,000 Jupiter-like planets.

To explore extrasolar planets, Kepler uses transitional methods. In the case of not being able to ' look ' directly, Kepler will observe the light from the stars. This measure has been widely used on Earth and verified.

CNES Corot satellite (Photo: flickr.com)

Corot satellite launched by CNES next fall will also use this method to explore planets around stars outside the Sun. The transition of a planet takes place when the planet rotates in front of its star and blocks a small portion of the star's light.

Kepler himself will get that ' dark time '. The idea to confirm the existence of an extrasolar planet is that this darkness recurs periodically, showing that there is an object orbiting the star. Later, scientists will use other calculations to determine the size and orbit of the planet.

Kepler is one of 10 projects under the Discovery Program of the US Aerospace Agency (NASA). This program allows scientists to conduct studies to gain a deeper understanding of the Solar System and to solve remaining questions with traditional observation methods, such as ground observatories.

The 10 satellites in the Discovery Program include: Mars Pathfinder, Near, Lunar Prospector (finished the mission well), Stardust, Genesis, Deep Impact, Messenger (active), Dawn and Kepler (growing) and only most Contour satellites failed due to the incident Comke Encke.

Kepler's bridge was produced by Brashear L-3, while Ball Aerospace was contracted to produce photometers (95 cm in diameter), the rest of the satellite and technical. Ball Aerospace is also an important partner of NASA in the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes projects as well as the Deep Impact exploration satellite.

PHUONG THAO