NASA Space Telescope Launches Earth-like Planet Finder

Cape Canaveral, Florida – NASA launched a pioneering telescope, Friday, to explore a corner of the Milky Way galaxy in the hope of finding the possibility of the existence of planets like Earth.

Kepler’s telescope is named after sinking into the starry sky was taken by unmanned Delta rocket launched at 10:49, Friday night U.S. time (Saturday afternoon GMT) from the U.S. Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“So far, although we have found more than 300 planets (outside the solar system), we did not find anything similar to Earth,” said Nasa’s space science business, Ed Weiler.

Kepler, an astronomer named after the 17th century Johannes Kepler, designed to find planets similar to Earth.

Once in position trailing Earth in around the Sun, Kepler will move towards one corner of the sky between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra are filled by more than 4 million stars.

The scientists plan to look at Kepler’s observations of more than 100 thousand targets in the hope of catching a small spark of light from planets that pass.

“Trying to detect planets the size of Jupiter in front of the stars is like trying to measure the effect of a mosquito flying vehicle headlights. Finding a planet-sized planet Earth was like trying to detect very small lice,” said Jim Fanson, Kepler project manager.

Besides hard to do, measuring the planet will also be time consuming.

An Earth-sized planet similar to Earth’s distance to the sun, Kepler will only be seen once a year. The scientists said that they would arrest the three transits to verify the existence of an Earth-sized world.

NASA’s Kepler mission hope to follow up costing 591 million U.S. dollars with a new generation of telescopes capable of imaging high-planet Earth-sized planets and analyze their atmospheres of gas in order to find elements that indicate the existence of life.

“I think we’ll be really surprised if Kepler did not find any Earth-like planets. I think we’ll find many Earth-sized planets,” said astronomer Alan Boss who worked for the Carnegie Institution, Washington.