Search for Earth Sized Planets: Begin
Its not that we haven’t been trying, but for all our effort… the best we have found lurking among the stars comparable to our home is a planet at about 5x Earth sizes. When you consider the advances and methods of detection, one can almost assume that Earth-like extra planet discoveries will be made from ground-based observations very soon. With this week’s successful Kepler launch, the assumption may be that (if they are out there) we might be talking about finding many Earth-like planets beyond our Solar System fairly soon. Hopefully, the job of finding extra-solar planets is about to get really interesting.
Click the image for a hi-res to see the banner on the side (or here). I like how home-made it seems, “Search for Earth Sized Planets”. Makes it almost seem like a boy-scouts rocket project.

March 9th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Hmm, I’m pretty sure that the primary mission is to find Earth-LIKE planets, not Earth-SIZE planets. Granted, it may find both as well as any other planet that passes in front of it’s parent star. Maybe whoever made up the banner on the side of the rocket made a mistake.