Searching for Habitable Planets
Photo credit: NASA/Tony Gray
This past Friday night at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time the Kepler Space Telescope successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The telescope will be able to detect other Earth-like planets in orbit around sun-like stars. For at least the next three and a half years, the Kepler Space Telescope will be observing the universe, serving as a tool to help the world come one step closer to determining if there is life in universe beyond our planet.
The SETI Institute has been deeply involved in this mission, including Jill Tarter as a member of the Kepler Mission Science Working Group.
Here are five quick facts about the Kepler, courtesy of NASA:
Kepler is the world’s first mission with the ability to find true Earth analogs — planets that orbit stars like our sun in the “habitable zone.” The habitable zone is the region around a star where the temperature is just right for water — an essential ingredient for life as we know it — to pool on a planet’s surface.
By the end of Kepler’s three-and-one-half-year mission, it will give us a good idea of how common or rare other Earths are in our Milky Way galaxy. This will be an important step in answering the age-old question: Are we alone?
Kepler detects planets by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars. Some planets pass in front of their stars as seen from our point of view on Earth; when they do, they cause their stars to dim slightly, an event Kepler can see.
Kepler has the largest camera ever launched into space, a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, like those in everyday digital cameras.
Kepler’s telescope is so powerful that, from its view up in space, it could detect one person in a small town turning off a porch light at night.
