The Kepler Mission is a NASA space observatory designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. The spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009. With a planned mission lifetime of at least 3.5 years, Kepler uses a photometer developed by NASA to continuously monitor the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view. The data collected from these observations will be analyzed to detect periodic fluctuations that indicate the presence of extrasolar planets (planets outside our solar system) that are in the process of crossing the face of other stars. - Source: Wikipedia
Related Stories
