Up, Up and Away! Best of Luck, Kepler.

“We have a feeling like we’re about to set sail across an ocean to discover a new world. It’s sort of the same feeling Columbus or Magellan must have had.” So spoke NASA JPL project manager Jim Fanson this week as a Delta II rocket carried the Kepler spacecraft into orbit. For all of us who misspent much of our youth reading novels by Isaac Asimov and dreaming of worlds orbiting distant stars, this is an exciting moment. With Kepler in orbit, we will shortly begin scanning hundreds of thousands of stars similar in size to our own sun and attempting to detect “Goldilocks worlds.”

We’ve identified several hundred planets so far using the wobble method, but they tend to be huge gas giants like Jupiter orbiting close to their home stars. Interesting to be sure, but not likely targets to find potential life. What we’re looking for are smaller, rocky worlds like Earth which orbit in the golden zone surrounding stable stars and are at just the right distance to allow for water to exist in liquid form. Kepler will do just that.

It will take from three to six years to complete the survey in the target patch of stars. NASA will focus on between 100,000 to 150,000 stars out of the 4.5 million in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our galaxy. Kepler will collect data continuously and then spin around once per month and download the information to NASA. We may begin seeing the first results by this summer. There are high hopes that hundreds of Earth like worlds will emerge, and if they do we can then focus other resources such as radio telescopes on those specific targets.

Hang in there, E.T. We may finally be getting ready to phone home. What of you, good readers? What if we turn up a radio signal of obviously artificial origin coming from one of those distant points of light in the sky? Will that have any impact on your view of yourself and the world around you?