14 DAY TRIAL // In response to the anticipation felt in the international astronomical community and among end users, NASA announced that the experts managing the Kepler Telescope mission will be releasing a new quarterly batch of data on September 23.
During the announcement, which was made yesterday, August 12, NASA said that Kepler science data collected between September and December 2009 will be made available in a public archive. These are 2009 quarter three data, officials say.
The reason why so many people are interested in what Kepler sees is because the telescope has garnered a huge degree of public interest in its mission. This is largely due to the fact that it is the first (and thus far only) instrument dedicated exclusively to finding alien planets.
The Q3 data the Kepler team will be releasing is scheduled to appear on the Space Telescope Science Institute's (STScI) website, here. The information will be freely accessible to anyone interested, and will most likely be included in projects such as amateur science website Planet Hunters.
The goal of such endeavors is to involve the general public in the search for extrasolar planets. Identifying all potential candidates is extremely tough and resource-demanding, and so professional astronomers are outsourcing this task, so that they can focus on the bigger picture.
“The team recognizes a strong demand from the scientific community for more public data. This is evident by the volume of papers on exoplanet science as well as stellar astrophysics that have been published using Kepler data,” Kepler Mission project scientist Nick Gautier explains.
For instance, some independent research groups are using data provided by the telescope in order to either confirm or infirm the existence of proposed exoplanets. About 573 such objects are known to data, but Kepler proposed the existence of 1,235 in its latest data release.
As such, there is currently a large-scale international effort going on for determining which of these hundreds of planets is actually an alien world, and which is just a series of anomalies in the data.
What separates Kepler from any other telescope is the fact that it can spot planets orbiting within their parent stars' habitable zones. This is the area where temperatures are just right to allow for the development of liquid water on the surface, which may in turn enable the development of life.
“Although additional observations will be needed over time to reach that milestone, Kepler is detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help us better understand our place in the galaxy,” NASA says.