[ExI] Kepler's planet finding days might be over

[Dan]

On Thursday, May 16, 2013 10:05 AM Tomaz Kristan <protokol2020 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Has the Kepler found an Earth like planet? AFAIK it has not.

I thought it found a few candidates. I don't follow this closely, but have all the data been vetted at this point? And what about Kepler-22b:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-22b


> The marketing was, that it will be able to find the oxygen absorption
> lines and therefore planets with the molecular oxygen in the atmosphere
> and therefore planet with likely life. Besides, it will be able to scan
> hundred of thousands of stars at once, so the chances are superb, to
> find life.
>
> That was the marketing at the beginning of the mission.

I don't recall that being the mission. I thought the mission was and is to find Earth-like planets via parent star transits -- specifically, by detecting variations in a candidate star's brightness.

> (Very much like robotic searching the fossils on Mars, which eventually
> failed to find a single drop of water there.)

Were robots on Mars ever searching for fossils? I thought they were looking to find indirect evidence of past or extant life. It'd be interesting to have actual fossil hunting robots, but if fossils on Mars are anything like on Earth they're going to be very difficult to find and require a much more exhaustive search. So far, the amount of ground covered on Mars is tiny. Think if the same probes landed, say, in the Atacama Desert and drove around for a few kilometers. They would totally miss the Burgess Shale fossils.

Regards,


Dan
 See my SF short story "Residue":
http://www.amazon.com/Residue-ebook/dp/B00BS3T0RM/ -- US
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BS3T0RM -- UK
http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00BS3T0RM -- Canada
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130516/be71900b/attachment.html>