Corot: Planet Hunter

No, really, is there an accepted procedure for trying to establish contact via radio or laser signal assuming spectrographic measurements suggest a biosphere? I can't imagine any current government funding the launch of a probe which wouldn't rendezvous for a hundred thousand years.
 
I'd imagine it'll be ~1 year before any discoveries reach the public arena. Often with space missions the first 3-6 months are taken up by shake-down and testing of all the hardware to make sure nothing has failed during launch, and with commissioning and PV-Cal (performance verification & calibration) observations to ensure that the instruments are operating within spec.

Even once that's done analysing the data is no small task as one has to be sure that the transit signatures are real and not due to some instrumental artifact, so one might impose a requirement of observing numerous transits before making wild claims in the literature! Although the analysis software will have already been written and tested using simulated data, real data always throws up surprises. So they'll be doing exceptionally well to get anything out quicker than ~1 year from now.

It's an exciting mission though, should produce some excellent results if things go according to plan!
 
The_Wolf_Who_Cried_Boy said:
I've sometimes wondered what exactly we're supposed to do if we actually find another suitably hospitable planet, especially if it's relatively close?
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It teaches us more about the formation of planet systems in the universe, which is the purpose of this mission, not to find new worlds we can inhabit.
 
i think if we found a habitable planet, it'd be like all the other regions that man has gone to, and then not lived in: anartica, polar ice caps, parts of africa/south america (in the 1400's and 1500's), the moon, etc, just declare HUGE TRACTS OF LAND, for each govt, and then never use them (except that africa/south america did eventually become inhabited, but not by the original "colonists" instead by spread of the peoples who originally lived there + mating + a few colonists here and there, and so on)
 
nutball said:
I'd imagine it'll be ~1 year before any discoveries reach the public arena. Often with space missions the first 3-6 months are taken up by shake-down and testing of all the hardware to make sure nothing has failed during launch, and with commissioning and PV-Cal (performance verification & calibration) observations to ensure that the instruments are operating within spec.

Even once that's done analysing the data is no small task as one has to be sure that the transit signatures are real and not due to some instrumental artifact, so one might impose a requirement of observing numerous transits before making wild claims in the literature! Although the analysis software will have already been written and tested using simulated data, real data always throws up surprises. So they'll be doing exceptionally well to get anything out quicker than ~1 year from now.

It's an exciting mission though, should produce some excellent results if things go according to plan!
Click to expand...
Your right, i was just looking for news on corot and found this website:
http://smsc.cnes.fr/COROT/
It looks like Jan 2009 will be the earliest that we will see data being analyzed.

epic
 
obobski said:
(except that africa/south america did eventually become inhabited, but not by the original "colonists" instead by spread of the peoples who originally lived there + mating + a few colonists here and there, and so on)
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Uh. Africa was like, the continent where man evolved. So yes, it would indeed have been inhabited.. Before the other continents in fact. :cool:

Peace.
 
http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=5512
COROT recently discovered 2 new gas-giant exoplanets and an unknown celestial object, taking the total of exoplanets it has found to 4. Other signals detected by the satellite could also indicate the existence of another exoplanet with a radius 1.7 times that of Earth’s.
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But it was a new type of object presented at the symposium that raised particular interest and fuelled intense debate among the COROT science team and the 200 astronomers in attendance. Provisionally dubbed CoRoT-exo-3b, this object is something of an oddity. “It’s slightly smaller than Jupiter (0.8 times its radius), but follow-up observations from the ground have pinned it at 20 Jupiter masses. It would appear to be somewhere between a planet and a compact brown dwarf, and is twice as dense as the metal platinum,” explains Olivier Vandermarcq, COROT mission leader at CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre. “It might just be the missing link between stars and planets!”
Click to expand...
Great discovery. Wish we could see this object/planet/star it sounds fascinating.
 
hm, hm
who'll be the first to start selling extra-solar land?
And due to the crysis prices will be low... good time for investment perhaps? :D
 
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