DarkSyde over at Daily Kos has a nice entry on the Kepler project that provides a nice bit of background on Johannes Kepler and an overview of just what the new NASA mission is supposed to accomplish.
Kepler did the math that showed the planets revolved around the sun, much to the chagrin of many religious leaders of the day who thought the Bible, rather than observation, should govern belief of how the universe functioned.
As for the current NASA mission:
Kepler is basically a horrendously accurate photometer married to a powerful wide view telescope that will trail the earth in deep space, undeterred by earth’s shadow, designed to detect minute changes in stellar brightness as planets cross in front of a parent star. The accuracy of Kepler’s photometer is so sensitive that it could detect a moth fluttering in front of a searchlight from hundreds of miles away. Only a tiny fraction of exosolar systems are likely to align in such a way that one or more planets conveniently eclipses its sun from our local perspective, but Kepler can look at one-hundred thousand stars at once!
The instrument should be able to detect the transit of smaller, more earthlike worlds along with their larger siblings, and hopefully produce a fair estimate on their size and mass. Future space and earth-based observatories will build on Kepler’s results to obtain spectra, and maybe one day the first ever direct images, revealing the atmospheric and surface composition of some of these new planets.
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