A Delta II rocket carrying the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station in Florida.
Kepler is a space telescope designed to survey distant stars to determine the prevalence of Earth-like planets.
Astronomers already have found more than 300 planets orbiting other stars, usually inhospitable gas giants like Jupiter. Kepler will be looking for smaller rocky planets more similar to Earth:
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Once it's settled into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, Kepler will stare nonstop at 100,000 stars near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, between 600 and 3,000 light years away.
NASA offers these quick facts about the Kepler mission:
- 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.
You can watch the launch in the following video:
Image courtesy of NASA
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