Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
We also have a growing library of space science talks featuring Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astrophysicist Sean Carroll and more.
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13 posts tagged Kepler
| Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.
The search began on May 8, when the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope — the largest steerable radio telescope in the world — dedicated an hour to eight stars with possible planets. Once UC Berkeley astronomers acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers. “It’s not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they’re very good places to look for ET,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion. read moreNew SETI Survey Focuses on Kepler’s Top Earth-Like Planets
| NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is proving itself to be a prolific planet hunter. Within just the first four months of data, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system.
In particular, the Kepler systems with multiple planets are much flatter than our solar system. They have to be for Kepler to spot them. Kepler watches for a planet to cross in front of its star, blocking a tiny fraction of the star’s light. By measuring how much the star dims during such a transit, astronomers can calculate the planet’s size, and by observing the time between successive events they can derive the orbital period — how long it takes the planet to revolve around its star. To see a transit, the planet’s orbit must be edge-on to our line of sight. To see multiple transiting planets, they all must be edge-on (or nearly so). “We didn’t anticipate that we would find so many multiple-transit systems. We thought we might see two or three. Instead, we found more than 100,” said Smithsonian astronomer David Latham (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). read moreKepler’s Astounding Haul of Multiple-Planet Systems
NASA’s Kepler Helps Astronomers Update Census of Sun-Like Stars
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NASA’s Kepler Mission has detected changes in brightness in 500 sun-like stars, giving astronomers a much better idea about the nature and evolution of the stars.
Prior to Kepler’s launch in March 2009, astronomers had identified the changes in brightness, or oscillations, of about 25 stars similar to our sun in size, age, composition and location within the Milky Way galaxy.
The discoveries are reported in a paper, “Ensemble Asteroseismology of Solar-Type Stars with the NASA Kepler Mission,” in the April 8 issue of the journal Science. The lead author of the paper is Bill Chaplin of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
The paper says Kepler is a big boost to asteroseismology, the study of stars by observations of their natural oscillations. Those oscillations provide clues about star basics such as mass, radius and age as well as clues about the internal structure of stars. read more
NASA’s Kepler finds more than 1200 exoplanets
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The new findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter.
Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized; some of them could even have moons with liquid water. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size — up to twice the size of Earth — to larger than Jupiter. The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009 of more than 156,000 stars using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky.
The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting stars like our sun in our galaxy. Kepler can find only a small fraction of the planets around the stars it looks at because the orbits aren’t aligned properly. If you account for those two factors, our results indicate there must be millions of planets orbiting the stars that surround our sun.
Source: NASA | Watch video via unknownskywalker
First rocky planet discovered by Kepler
NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.
The discovery of this so-called exoplanet is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010.
Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone, the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. However, since it orbits once every 0.84 days, Kepler-10b is more than 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun and not in the habitable zone.
The discovery of Kepler 10-b is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own. Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come.
Image: Artist concept of Kepler 10b.
• Source: NASA via unknownskywalker
