Need a vacation? Try a NASA Kepler exoplanet

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Retro travel posters issued by NASA celebrate some of the discoveries of the Kepler Space Telescope. Illustrations: NASA
Retro travel posters issued by NASA celebrate some of the discoveries of the Kepler Space Telescope. Illustrations: NASA

The exoplanet known as Kepler-16b is a gas giant near the outer limits of the habitable zone, but why should that discourage you from paying it a visit?

NASA has issued a set of three retro space-tourism posters to celebrate the discoveries of the Kepler Space Telescope, which has laid eyes on more than 1,000 confirmed exoplanets and more than 400 stellar systems.

If 16b — which is said to have a temperature similar to dry ice — doesn’t sound appealing, honeymooners might be drawn to the promise of romance with a double sunset. Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars, like Luke Skywalker’s native planet Tatooine, and the travel poster serves up this selling point: “Where Your Shadow Always Has Company.”

Double sunsets might not be your thing, but you will certainly be pulled to discover HD 40307g — literally. This rocky planet has eight times the gravitational pull of Earth, and the poster for this travel experience shows a sky diver, presumably falling very fast.

Of course, you may be more in the mood for a “habitable” destination. Consider Kepler-186f, “Where the Grass is Always Redder on the Other Side.” That’s right, red, because the star it orbits is much cooler, offering the promise of a very different color palette. It’s similar in size to Earth and this planet’s surface has conditions that astronomers say could hold liquid water.

Kepler-186f orbits a cooler star and could leave space travelers seeing red. Illustration: NASA
Kepler-186f orbits a cooler star and could leave space travelers seeing red. Illustration: NASA

And maybe build a picket fence. The poster shows two travelers at a white fence as they look out at field of red.

The Kepler Space Telescope launched into space in 2009 and engineers are grappling with two broken gyroscope reaction wheels, which are used to aim the telescope. Its main mission was completed in 2012 but astronomers are building their research around the parts of the telescope that still function. The ship’s thrusters could be used to help adjust the telescope’ss direction, according to NASA.

“Kepler has made extraordinary discoveries in finding exoplanets including several super-Earths in the habitable zone,” John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement released by NASA. “Knowing that Kepler has successfully collected all the data from its prime mission, I am confident that more amazing discoveries are on the horizon.”

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