Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Kepler Announcement Today

STScI runs the routine science data processing pipeline and archiving for Kepler data ... they have identified about 1200 planet candidates in all, including one system with six planets.

NASA Telescope Reveals Over 1,000 New Potential Alien Planets | Exoplanets & Kepler Space Telescope | Space.com

"We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the Kepler mission’s science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."