The most extensive search yet for Earth-like planets that could harbor life beyond the solar system is due to start today with the launch of a spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The Kepler probe is the first NASA mission capable of finding habitable planets like our own in faraway regions of the galaxy. If all goes to plan, the probe will be blasted into space from the Florida site at 3:48am GMT atop a Delta II rocket, which will put the craft into a solar orbit that lags behind the Earth as it circles the Sun.
From this vantage point the probe will spend three-and-a-half years gazing at a star-rich region of the Milky Way. The aim is to find planets at a distance from their suns called the “Goldilocks zone” — because it is neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right for the presence of water.
To find alien life, NASA’s mantra is “follow the water.” One of the main tasks of the mission is to find out how many Earth-like planets there are beyond our solar system, a question that has profound significance for the likelihood of life elsewhere.
“Finding that most stars have Earths implies that the conditions that support the development of life could be common throughout our galaxy,” said William Borucki, Kepler’s chief scientist, at NASA’s Ames research center in California. “Finding few or no Earths indicates that we might be alone.”
Mission scientists will use Kepler’s 95-megapixel camera to survey the brightness of 100,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra every half an hour. Planets will reveal themselves as almost imperceptible reductions in brightness as they move across the faces of their stars.
“If Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front,” said James Fanson, project manager at NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in California.
By watching for long enough, Kepler should be able to spot planets that take a year or more to orbit their star. Most of the stars in the camera’s field of view, which is as wide as two outstretched hands, are hundreds or thousands of light years away from Earth.
“There’s a very raw instinct to want to know if there are worlds like ours out there,” said Suzanne Aigrain, an astrophysicist at Exeter University, England, who works on Corot. “It leads us to question, are we alone? Are there other forms of life out there, forms we might recognize as akin to our own civilized form of life?”
“But it goes way beyond that. As scientists we’re always trying to explore uncharted areas and we haven’t been able to find planets like ours outside the solar system, so this is a new frontier,” she said.
Though the Kepler mission can detect Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits around stars, it will not be able to determine if they harbor life. For that, we will have to wait for missions that can analyze the atmospheres of the alien worlds.
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