Kepler:
Goals: Kepler, a NASA Discovery mission, is designed to survey other solar systems in our region of the Milky Way galaxy to detect and characterize Earth-sized and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone. A habitable zone encompasses the distances from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface, a key component of life as we know it.

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6 Mar 2009:  Launch Status:  In Flight Show All Dates for KEPLER		14 May 2009:  Planet Hunt Underway 17 Apr 2009:  Kepler's First Look 9 Apr 2009:  Kepler Jettisons Dust Cover More Headlines
Kepler is NASA's first mission capable of finding Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. It is named for Johannes Kepler (right), the 17th Century German mathematician who first explained planetary motion. The spacecraft will continuously and simultaneously monitors brightnesses of 100,000 stars brighter than 14th magnitude in the constellations Cygnus and Lyrae.		Solar System Bodies: Beyond Our Solar System KEPLER Multimedia Gallery