Word: earthly
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...years? Then be glad you're not NASA's Kepler telescope, which is set to blast into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla., this Friday night. Kepler's job may sound boring to you, but what the spacecraft accomplishes could be extraordinary: the discovery of the first Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars. Those kinds of places might well be brewing Earth-like forms of life...
...nine worlds orbiting our own sun - eight actually, now that Pluto's been busted down to planetoid - we had no luck. The problem is, stars are huge, and by comparison, even big planets are tiny. Squint all you want; you're not going to see them. (See pictures of Earth from space...
...that nothing living would have a chance. What biology needs in order to get going is a relatively small, rocky planet orbiting in what's called a star's habitable zone - a place where things get hot but not too hot, cold but not too cold. A place like Earth, in other words. In the 14 years since 51 Pegasus b was found, astronomers have counted a total of 342 planets orbiting 289 stars, but not a single one of them is of the so-called terrestrial variety. (See pictures of Saturn...
...Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space," says NASA's James Fanson, the Kepler project manager, "it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as someone passed in front...
...survey them all. Instead, it will sample about 100,000 in a region of our solar system known as Cygnus-Lyra. That spot was chosen both because it's rich in stars and because it lies above our own orbital plane. Kepler - which will be launched into not an Earth orbit but a solar orbit - can thus simply train its gaze up and never have to worry about any bodies in the home solar system blocking its view. (See pictures of five nations' space programs...