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PlanetQuest Update
2008-06-05 23:27:00 I received an e-mail today from Dr. Laurence Doyle of PlanetQuest, the BOINC-based search for extra-solar planets. I had e-mailed Dr. Doyle asking for a status update, and this is what he replied: We have been stalled with fund raising -- but I have written a business plan and that is being circulated through possible donors. As far as the (more predictable) science is concerned, we have half of the detection algorithms running on BOINC and we have a star catalogue of about 2 million observations reduced to light curves. We are also including some re-processed HST images (7-day search for extrasolar planets) and some other public domain data to include -- i.e., to be searched for eclipsing binary planets. Finally, I have been added (via a successful proposal) to the NASA Kepler mission and hope to share some of that data with PlanetQuesters, so that we can all participate in this mission to detect the first "Earths." It sounds like PlanetQuest is going to have a lot of data for ...
PlanetQuest Update
2008-01-25 14:59:00 Laurence Doyle posted a new update early this morning on PlanetQuest, saying: I applied for the NASA Kepler Science Team and included PlanetQuest as the educational component of the proposal. I proposed to find planets in the multiple star systems that Kepler observes and won the proposal. So, there will be NASA Kepler spacecraft data in the PlanetQuest Collaboratory (we'll divvy it up evenly) to look for planets in. What is amazing about these data is that the precision will be 100 times anything achieved on Earth -- that is, the detection of Earth-sized planets around Sunlike stars will be possible. So this seems like good news for both Dr. Doyle's PlanetQuest efforts and the Kepler Mission, both of which are projects that I've been interested in for a very long time. Now, if PlanetQuest can just get their software out the door and into my grubby little hands....
PlanetQuest Update
2007-08-09 15:07:00 Another update from Dr. Laurance Doyle on the status of the PlanetQuest group: ...Our lack of progress at the moment is a funding issue which we feel could be solved if we can get initial funding to a point where we can finish the alpha test version of the software and thereafter sign folks up to be supporting-founding members of PlanetQuest. We do have sufficient astronomical data (stellar light curves) at present for a thorough test of the system and could accommodate perhaps up to 100,000 users for a year. This was previously my main concern. We have also carried the problem through from data acquisition to light curve model fitting (the transit detection algorithm) and therefore see no technical issues in the way of proceeding. Most of our personnel, however, are also extremely busy people working in other businesses and on other projects, and so PlanetQuest has not received the attention lately that it needs to move forward as quickly as it could, because it i...
PlanetQuest Update
2007-03-01 20:35:00 I received an email today from Dr. Laurance Doyle, who (among other things) serves as the President of PlanetQuest. PlanetQuest is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to inspire global participation in the discovery of planets. Their goal is to launch a distributed computing project using the BOINC platform that I've blogged about here before. Their software--dubbed Collaboratory--will analyze data from telescopes focused on extremely dense star regions, such as the center of the galaxy in Sagittarius in the hopes of finding planets around other stars. From their website: Discovering a new delta Scuti star, for example, will help astronomers better understand the stability of stars; a new Cepheid variable star would help astronomers determine how far away stars are. Most exciting of all, you could discover a new planet—a never-before-seen world beyond our solar system! You will be credited for your discovery, and your find will be entered into the PlanetQuest ... |
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