Kepler ready to go

After being launched in March of this year the kepler space telescope is ready to find worlds. Recently it under went some tests to see if it could detect exo-planets (planets orbiting other stars). It passed its test by finding a planet that orbits its host star every few day. Yes, it was an already know planet, but kepler was able to find it and because of the precise data and clearer view that it has in space it was able to tell that it has an atmosphere.



The graph above shows when the planet passes in front of the star and how we would see it in phases as it did so if we could actually see it. But kepler is only going to detect and find the planets, another telescope to launched in a couple of years will hopefully get the first real pictures of an exo-planet. Keplers mission is to find earth sized planets in the parent star's habitable zone.

The current count on the number of exo-planets is 357. Most being huge gas gaints even larger than Jupiter.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-discovery.html