On Saturday at 9:49pm, Keplar successfully launched into space.
It’s a new telescope with an intriguing mission: find earth-sized planets in earth-distant orbits around other stars.
We have been finding lots of other planets around stars for a while now (hundreds), but none can even hope to be earth-like. Most are too big. Jupiter big. That is because the technique used to find them: measuring the gravitational wobble of the star, is too small to see with the current telescopes unless the planets are huge.
This satellite will enter solar (not earth) orbit. It will be scanning for photonic variations from a particular swath of stars. It has a 95 megapixel camera. Distant from earth, it will have less RF/light noise to deal with.
Ideally, it will return size, mass, orbital distance, and even, hopefully, surface temperature.
We might find that second Earth.
NASA’s link: Kepler