The launch of NASA’s Kepler telescope was a success. The telescope was launched on the back of a Delta II rocket on Friday at 10:50 p.m. from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The goal of the mission is to find if there are Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. 

 

The Kepler telescope will be positioned beyond Earth’s orbit and will circle the sun aiming itself at the constellation Cygnus. The telescope will scrutinize an area that contains as many as 100,000 stars similar to our sun. 

 

The telescope was built by Ball Aerospace using know-how from the previous NASA missions including instruments for the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, and the Deep Impact mission. However, this is NASA’s first mission of this sort. It aims to find planets that are Earth-like, meaning that they are rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone whit liquid water on their surface.

 

The mission will take at least three years (possibly six) in space searching our galaxy for planets that can sustain life as we know it on Earth. The mission will provide important data to scientists who could use it to find out more about our planet’s origins and how it evolved. The Kepler mission will also be a pathfinder for similar missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope that will most likely launch in 2013. 

 

So far, NASA has detected 342 exosolar planets through a series of measurement. Most of those planets are gas giants with characteristics similar to Jupiter and Neptune. Let’s hope the Kepler mission finds some planets that would remind an astronaut more of home.