Sciences: Space Explore: NASA launches Kepler Mission (agency's 10th Discovery mission) to look for Earth-like planets

KEPLER MISSION: A search for habitable planets. -- official website offers this succinct summary of the project (but don't miss the whole item "Importance of Planet Detection").

The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.

Results from this mission will allow us to place our solar system within the continuum of planetary systems in the Galaxy.

Magnalia Dei!, as Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) m+t be saying.

Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz [Germany] due to the [Roman Catholic] counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague [Czech Republic nowadays] to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He inherited Tycho's post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in foreword to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), a fundamental law of nature. Today we call this the scientific method.

Do not miss, in the just-quoted text, how the scientific method is defined, while attributing this pioneering usage of its mathematics-enriched method to Dr Kepler: "a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich, in the Forward).