"A Mission for the Ages"

Image credit: NASA TV

That's how one NASA scientist described the Kepler mission launched tonight from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This spacecraft and mission is designed specifically to find Earth sized planets orbiting other stars in a zone that might allow them to be 'habitable' by life.

Space.com has posted an article describing how Kepler will search for other worlds and a descriptive video (~7-1/2 min) featuring some of the key people involved in the mission. Meanwhile, Jeff Foust describes the mission and its significance here.

Because multiple transit detections are needed to confirm an exoplanet discovery, it will take essentially the entire 3.5-year mission to detect planets in Earth-like orbits. (Closer in planets with shorter periods will be found more quickly; Kepler should be able to find any planets in Mercury-like orbits in its first year of observations.) "In about three or four years from now there will be a press conference at NASA Headquarters," predicted Alan Boss, a Carnegie Institution of Washington astronomer who studies extrasolar planets and recently published a book on the topic (see "Review: The Crowded Universe", The Space Review, February 16, 2009), where Kepler project officials "will stand up and tell us just how frequently Earths occur."

It is significant that even in perilous times, humans continue to explore and seek out knowledge of the universe around us. Kepler may show us worlds that may turn out to be inhabited by life, or else could in the distant future could be inhabited by humans (pending travel technology far beyond any capability we have today).