A recycled
comet-smashing probe has begun a new mission to seek out alien worlds beyond
our own solar system.
The
surviving mothership of NASA's Deep
Impact mission, which released an impacting vehicle that slammed into a
comet in 2005 to learn more about it, is now aiming its largest telescope at
five different stars to catch a glimpse at any planets they may harbor.
"We're on
the hunt for planets down to the size of Earth, orbiting some of our closest
neighboring stars," said Drake Deming, deputy principal investigator of Deep
Impact's planet-hunting
EPOXI mission, in a statement.
Deep Impact
trained its largest telescope on its first target on Jan. 22 to look for dips
in the star's light, the tell-tale sign of a planet crossing in front of its
stellar parent as seen from Earth.
"We can
analyze this light to discover what the atmospheres of these planets are
like," said Deming, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md.
Each of the
five target stars on Deep Impact's list is known to host massive,
close-orbiting extrasolar planets the size of Jupiter or larger, mission
researchers said.
About the
size of an mid-size sport utility vehicle, Deep Impact's flyby spacecraft carries
two telescopic cameras - one for high-resolution and another for
medium-resolution - which it used to observe the crash
of its impactor probe into the Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005.
The EPOXI
mission is a combination of two separate science investigations designed to
make the most of the Deep Impact spacecraft. In addition to the planet hunt,
known as the Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCh), the
spacecraft is also en route to a swing-by of Comet Hartley 2 on Oct. 11, 2010.
The comet investigation,
dubbed the Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI), will map gas outbursts
from Hartley 2 and search for water ice.
advertisement
