In the first test of its planet-hunting ability, NASA's new spacecraft Kepler has shown that it can indeed detect 
planetary objects orbiting distant stars, and is now ready to search for Earth-like planets far out in the Milky Way galaxy.Whether such planets hold the right atmospheres and life-giving water in the "habitable" zones of their solar systems will be for other spacecraft to discover. Kepler's job is to locate them and determine their orbits - and scientists from the Ames Research Center in Mountain View were happy enough Thursday to report that their space telescope is working superbly and is ready for the quest. In a detailed report just published in the journal Science and during a telephone news conference from Washington, William Borucki, the leader of the Kepler team at Ames, said his group was awed at the data Kepler gathered from its first observations of a giant planet larger than Jupiter that lies more than 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.
planetary objects orbiting distant stars, and is now ready to search for Earth-like planets far out in the Milky Way galaxy.Whether such planets hold the right atmospheres and life-giving water in the "habitable" zones of their solar systems will be for other spacecraft to discover. Kepler's job is to locate them and determine their orbits - and scientists from the Ames Research Center in Mountain View were happy enough Thursday to report that their space telescope is working superbly and is ready for the quest. In a detailed report just published in the journal Science and during a telephone news conference from Washington, William Borucki, the leader of the Kepler team at Ames, said his group was awed at the data Kepler gathered from its first observations of a giant planet larger than Jupiter that lies more than 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.For further details visit as : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/06/MNQR195459.DTL
