Alien Earth Hunter Gets New Lease on Life

NASA has awarded extensions to nine of its astrophysics missions, including Kepler , a space telescope that hunts for planets around other stars. The extension, which could keep Kepler in operation until 2016, should be a boon for the hunt for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars, which requires observations spanning years. Kepler was just getting started, having launched in March 2009. The $600 million telescope hunts for exoplanets by staring at a patch of sky containing some 4.5 million Milky Way stars. It uses a 95-megapixel camera to register slight dips in stellar brightness that signal a planet's passage across its host star. Despite launching with some unexpectedly noisy CCDs , the telescope has proved an efficient planet-finder, turning up 61 confirmed exoplanets and more than 2000 additional candidate worlds. In December, it bagged its first potentially habit...

Full article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics...

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