The Kepler Mission Is Launched

The Kepler Mission uses a NASA space telescope designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. With a planned mission lifetime of at least 3.5 years, Kepler uses a photometer developed by NASA to continuously monitor the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence 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 extrasolar planets (planets outside our solar system) that are in the process of crossing the face of other stars. The mission is named in honor of German astronomer Johannes Kepler.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Mission