NASA recently announced that the biggest camera to ever be launched into outer space will soon scour the Milky Way galaxy for warm, rocky, "Earth-like" planets that may host life. The Kepler spacecraft is scheduled to spend 3 1/2 years looking at more than 100,000 stars similar to our sun, with the rest of us hoping that some Star Wars-like universes actually exist.
"Kepler will push back the boundaries of the unknown in our patch of the Milky Way galaxy. And its discoveries may fundamentally alter humanity's view of itself," Jon Morse, director of NASA's astrophysics division, told reporters.
The spaceship will cruise around the "habitable" zones of stars--areas where a planet wouldn't be so close as to be burnt to a crisp, and not so far away as to be frozen. But to give some perspective on this issue, 300 some planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than our sun since 1995, but most are large gas planets unlikely able to host life. William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California remains optimistic; however, with Reuters reporting that he estimated Kepler could find as much as 50 rocky and water-containing planets.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and scientists could spend the next 3 1/2 years looking at grainy video images of barren planets instead. The mission starts March 5, and NASA says it will cost $591 million--let's hope it finds some needy extraterrestrials because there's plenty of life forms here on earth that could use such funds right now.
1 comment:
Well it is a great effort, trying to understand the universe and trying to understand how it works. It is time to really make the difference, there are stars in the universe as publicity for http://www.softcialis.net/ on the web. Around any of those stars a planet full of life must exist.
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