Success! Kepler lifts off to seek other Earths

Artist's rendering of the Kepler mission. Credit: NASA

Kepler as it appeared moments prior to launch in Florida. Credit: NASA

NASA’s Kepler mission lifted off without a hitch just before 11 p.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 

The launch was a bit of a nail-biter, coming on the heels of last week’s failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which plummeted (all $270 million of it) into the ocean when its casing malfunctioned. But everything for the Kepler launch — from the weather to the countdown — went flawlessly. At five minutes to launch, Kepler’s rockets sent ribbons of smoke into Florida’s 65-degree nighttime air under perfectly clear skies. With 30 seconds left, confirmation commands were exchanged with practiced precision. The casing (called the fairing) fell off with grace, and three minutes into the flight, the craft was cruising away from Earth at 6,980 miles per hour. A NASA spokesman chronicling the launch noted that all the major launch events happened within a second of their predicted times. 

Kepler lifts off from Cape Canaveral. Credit: Tim Bailey, via Twitter

Kepler fires the imagination, as it could finally address the age-old question of whether we Earthlings are alone. I loved this quote from William Borucki, NASA’s principal investigator for Kepler science, who spoke about the mission at a NASA press conference last month. He said if Kepler spies Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars, “life may well be common throughout our universe. If on the other hand we don’t find any, that will be another profound discovery. In fact it will mean there will be no Star Trek.”

One cynical commenter at Universe Today, where I put that quote in a story, accused Borucki of fence-sitting. I disagree; I think the fact that we’re addressing the question is newsworthy, and exciting. 

And it makes me think big, if you want to know the truth. It makes me think about God. I’m sure that’s one reason I got so excited when Exoplanetology started tweeting (posting notes on the website Twitter) last week about Catholic astronomer Guy Consolmagno, who has a lot to say about Kepler.

First, the mission:

The $500 million Kepler mission will spend three and a half years surveying more than 100,000 sun-like stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.  Its telescope is specially designed to detect the periodic dimming of stars that planets cause as they pass by. 

By staring at one large patch of sky for the duration of its lifetime, Kepler will be able to watch planets periodically transit their stars over multiple cycles, allowing astronomers to confirm the presence of planets and use the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, along with ground-based telescopes, to characterize their atmospheres and orbits. Earth-size planets in habitable zones would theoretically take about a year to complete one orbit, so Kepler will monitor those stars for at least three years to confirm the planets’ presence.

Astronomers estimate that if even one percent of stars host Earth-like planets, there would be a million Earths in the Milky Way alone. If that’s true, hundreds of Earths should exist in Kepler’s focus population of 100,000 stars. 

And so what about the Catholics? Many people are surprised when they learn the Vatican runs an Italy-based astronomy observatory with a telescope near Tucson, Arizona.

Consolmagno is curator of the Vatican’s meteorite collection, and he was interviewed (or perhaps invited to submit an opinion piece) last week by BBC News.

What’s amazing to me is how far the Catholic Church has come since its anti-science beginnings, including the unseemly treatment of a long-ago Galileo, whose crime was to popularize the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Now, Consolmagno told BBC News, “We Jesuits are actively involved in the search for Earth-like planets.”

Consolmagno goes on: “The idea that there might not only be us is a wonderful one. It does not question our uniqueness or contradict our belief in God. For most people, if new forms of life were to be discovered, it would not mean everything they believed was wrong, it would only reinforce what they believed all along.”

He points out that John Herschel, a founder of the Royal Astronomical Society, “argued that it would have been a waste of a Universe if God had only created one place where there were people He loved.”

For Consolmagno, the important thing to remember is that the Universe “is the deliberate creation of a loving God,” he said. “My science tells me how God created the Universe and that he loves that Universe. We shouldn’t be afraid of the truth.”

Words to live by, I think, and they sort of make me proud that I grew up Catholic. If only all the world’s religions could maintain such an open mind about science; maybe then fundamentalist Christians wouldn’t be at such loggerheads with other modern advances, like the miraculous discovery and chronicling of evolution. And if only the Catholic Church was as open-minded about the validity of other religions as it is about science … well, then, I might go back to mass. 

An artists rendering of what our galaxy might look as viewed by an outsider. The cone illustrates the neighborhood of our galaxy where Kepler will search for habitable planets. Credit: Jon Lomberg