Kepler’s Six Years In Science (and Counting)

VIA NASA.GOV

The graphic tells NASA’s Kepler spacecraft’s story by the numbers from the moment it began hunting for planets outside our solar system on May 12, 2009. From the trove of data collected, we have learned that planets are common, that most sun-like stars have at least one planet and that nature makes planets with unimaginable diversity.

Kepler launched on March 6, 2009. Its mission was to survey a portion of our galaxy to determine what fraction of stars might harbor potentially habitable, Earth-sized exoplanets or planets that orbit other stars.

Of the more than 1,000 confirmed planets found by Kepler, eight are less than twice Earth-sized and in their stars’ habitable zone. All eight orbit stars cooler and smaller than our sun.

Kepler’s exquisitely precise photometer, or light sensor, was designed to detect minute changes in brightness, to infer the presence of an Earth-sized planet. For a remote observer, Earth transiting the sun would dim its light by less than 1/100th of one percent, or the equivalent of the amount of light blocked by a gnat crawling across a car’s headlight viewed from several miles away.

In May 2014, the Kepler spacecraft began a new mission, K2, to observe parts of the sky along the ecliptic plane, the orbital path of the Earth about the sun, where the familiar constellations of the zodiac lie.