The Kepler Mission

The Kepler Mission is space observatory that is being ran by NASA. The main objective of the Kepler Mission will be to find Earth like extrasolar planets. It will observe and record planet transits on about 100,000 stars for a period of 4 years. Some of the things the Kepler Mission will help us determine will be, how many terrestrial or earth like exoplanets and large exoplanets there are in a stars habitable zone, the orbital paths and sizes of the exoplanets, guesstimate how many exoplanets there are in multi-star systems or binary star systems, the properties of the stars that harbor exoplanets and finding more exoplanets by the larger planets that have all ready been discovered.

The estimated launch date for the Space Observatory Kepler is February 16th, 2009. Though it probably wont be launched on this date since this mission has been delayed back a couple times do to NASA funding.

The spacecraft Kepler wont be orbiting Earth but it will be trailing behind Earth in the suns orbit taking it about 372 days to orbit the sun. This is so the Earth wont interfere with the spacecraft continuously focusing in on the 100,000 stars. The spacecrafts photometer will be aimed at the Cygnus constellation. The lens will be 1.4 meters, and the Kepler shoots with 27 micrometre pixels. The Kepler Mission will cost about 450 million dollars.

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