Kepler: A Search For Habitable Planets
Kepler is NASA's most significant attempt at finding planets orbiting stars other than our sun. The Kepler Mission is an ongoing project based upon the Kepler Spacecraft, which observes other stars with the hope of finding earth-like planets. The Kepler Instrument's field of view is small -about the same size as the area of the sky which can be covered by your hand held at arms-length. How, then, can we hope to find a planet similar to our own? Well, since the Milky Way galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, that tiny area amounts to a constant observation of roughly 100,000 stars across 3,000 light years. Kepler has proved very capable of discovering large planets with orbits astonishingly close to their stars, but the real challenge lies in detecting planets of near-earth size orbiting their stars at close to 1 AU, i.e. a planet which could harbor life forms (intelligent or otherwise). Kepler is perhaps the most important project NASA is currently undertaking (with the obvious exception of the Hubble Space Telescope). Kepler has, to this date, detected over 2,300 planet candidates, with some even orbiting binary star systems! Kepler has since confirmed 28 planets (and counting), with the first discovery of a planet in the Habitable Zone of a star coming just a few days ago! Kepler is opening the door to the future of astronomy and space exploration- discovering planets upon which alien life forms could exist, and even planets which could be used as human colonies. The observable universe is nearly 28 BLY across, and has well over 70 sextillion stars in total. The odds indicate that finding alien civilizations is a statistical certainty.
To visit the official NASA -Kepler webpage, please click here.
To visit the official NASA -Kepler webpage, please click here.
Images and information for captions taken from http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/index.html
All images and computer generations are the property of NASA and the companies which provided materials for the craft
All images and computer generations are the property of NASA and the companies which provided materials for the craft