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.
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“This planet is unequivocally rocky, with a surface you could stand on,” commented team member Dimitar Sasselov, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and a Kepler co-investigator.
Read more at NASA.
today i went to the JPL open house and got to see the deep space control room, the mars science lab mid-assembly and lots of robots and scale models. pretty great nerd stuff, and the whole thing had a very science fair-y vibe. scientists with tables set up – from photos and diagrams on poster boards to a model of orbiting stars and an actual model of an interferometer outputting data to a big plasma screen. my favorite part was actually the big shop where they manufacture parts for the probes and satellites.
…i also had a really good giant burrito.
