A Wealth of Worlds: Kepler Spacecraft Finds 6 New Exoplanets and Hints at 1,200 More

Wednesday, February 2, 2011 - 14:06 in Astronomy & Space

Thirty million kilometers away, trailing the pale blue dot that is Earth as it orbits the sun, is a spacecraft designed to find some of the countless other pale blue dots that may speckle the galaxy. NASA launched this spacecraft , known as Kepler, in 2009 to take a census of Earth-like planets in the hopes of figuring out how common--or how rare--are the conditions under which life has thrived here. [More]

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