NASA hopes to launch the giant telescope / light meter Kepler on Friday. The mission is to look for Earth-like planets in our galaxy - planets whose size and conditions could support life forms. From the Houston Chronicle:
The universe may be filled with Earth-like planets — worlds where extraterrestrials might flourish. But these planets were once considered too small to spot, even with the latest in space technology.
Now, many astronomers believe NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope, which is scheduled to shoot into space this week, will help to clear up the mystery.
Named for Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century German astronomer who studied planetary motion, the telescope is designed to search 100,000 stars in the Milky Way for Earth-sized rocky planets where water could flow and form streams, lakes and oceans.
Some astronomers believe the spacecraft could eventually find about 50 Earth-like planets.
“If we find that many, it will certainly mean life may well be common throughout our galaxy,” said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, the astronomer who leads the Kepler science team.
“On the other hand, if we don’t find any, that is still a profound discovery,” he said. “It will mean that Earth must be very rare. We may be the only life in our universe.
“It will mean there will be no Star Trek.”
Finding wobbly stars
The unmanned Kepler is scheduled to lift off aboard a Delta II rocket on Friday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its quest, though, is not as fanciful as it may seem.
Astronomers first discovered a planet outside our solar system in 1994 and have since identified 340 of them. But even the best observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope among them, are not equipped to spot something as tiny as the Earth at great distances.
So far, the discoveries have been made with telescopes that detect small wobbles in the movement of stars, which astronomers attribute to the gravitational tug of unseen planets.
Most of these worlds rival giant Jupiter in size. Many are larger. Some circle their stars so closely that their surface temperatures are much too high for life.
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