NASA is on the journey to launching it’s first mission to discover whether there are other Earth-size and smaller plants around other stars… and find, perhaps, more of us.
Their challenge is to find other terrestrial plants, where liquid water and possible life may exist. They call this the Kepler Mission.
The Kepler Mission is designed to explore and discover other planets near or inside of the 
livable zone in the Milky Way galaxy. As a result, they will acquire more knowledge about where our solar system resides in the Galaxy.
All planets detected so far are giant planets, and Kepler’s on the lookout for smaller ones.
The mission is mainly seeking the planet sizes, shapes, their orbit information, and their associated stars. They want to explore the structures and diversity of planetary systems, and this can be done by exploring a large sample of stars.
The method is called the “transit method” of planet finding. In layman’s terms, planets transit their parent stars by blocking a small amount of its light when it passes it. If this happens at regular times, it is a planet. The change in amount of light can determine the planet size, and the time can determine the orbit and estimate the temperature. With those qualities, they can determine if their is life on the planet.
Few planets similar to our own have been discovered due to their small size and distance from their parent star, making them difficult to find. The further away it is from the parent star, and the smaller the planet is, the less likely it is that when they pass it, it will be a visible impact.
Kepler’s telescope has a 1.5 metre-diameter mirror, making it the largest telescope sent out of Earth’s orbit. With this, can has a large field of view, and will be monitoring 100,000 stars, both continuously and simultaneously.
It will take about 3-5 years to complete the mission, and is set to launch March 6th at 10:49 p.m. EST
Principal Investigator William Borucki has been working on this mission for nearly 25 years. He is hopeful it will help astronomers better understand were we stand in the universe. “The data from Kepler will have a major impact, especially if we find lots of planets like ours orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars,” he explained. “Then we’ll know its likely that we aren’t alone, and that someday we might be able to join other intelligent life in the universe.”
Scientists hope to reinforce their current hypotheses about these facts for the plants. But if they find nothing at all, it could still be very significant.
For more information and to stay updated, visit the Kepler site from NASA.
Image courtesy of NASA.
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