Last evening around 23:00 NASA successfully launched the Kepler telescope. Kepler was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a Delta II rocket.
The Kepler telescope is designed to search our galaxy for planets much smaller than the planets found so far outside our solar system, which have been much larger than Earth. It is also going to be looking for planets which orbit at a certain distance from a star where temperatures permit liquid water.
According to NASA, the telescope will survey more than 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way galaxy over a period of three years. Kepler is so precise it can detect changes in brightness of 20 parts per million in stars that are thousands of light years away.
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