News tagged with kepler mission

The Kepler Mission uses a NASA space telescope designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Orbiting the sun for at least 3.5 years, Kepler will use a photometer developed by NASA to continuously monitor the brightness of over 100,000 stars in a fixed field of view. The data collected from these observations will be analyzed to detect periodic fluctuations that indicate the presence of transiting exoplanets. The mission is named in honor of German astronomer Johannes Kepler.

Kepler is a mission under NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, focused science missions. NASA's Ames Research Center is the home organization of the science principal investigator and is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. Kepler mission development is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. is responsible for developing the Kepler flight system.

The Kepler Spacecraft was launched on March 6, 2009 at 22:49:57 UTC-5.