NASA, through Kepler Space Telescope, has been doing a lot of explorations as a part of their mission in finding potential planets that are capable of supporting life. According to the agency, they are going to conduct a conference this Thursday to discuss the results of their hard work.
Kepler was launched in March 2009. It was the first mission of NASA intended to find exoplanets - planets that can sustain life and possess same attributes like Earth.
The main objective of the Kepler Mission is to understand and explore the structure and diversity of the planetary systems. This mission is intended to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to find Earth-like planets situated in or near the habitable zone. Also, this is also intended to identify how many stars possess such planets.
The survey of this mission will also help in identifying the abundance of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars, determining the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of the planets, estimating how many planets there are in multiple-star systems, determining the properties of those stars, etc.
The Kepler Space Telescope has selected 1,028 planets already. They believed that 22 of those planets have the conditions needed to support and sustain life.
According to the press release of NASA, the participants who will discuss the details of their discoveries are as follows:
- John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington
- Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California
- Jeff Coughlin, Kepler research scientist at SETI Institute in Mountain View, California
- Didier Queloz, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University, United Kingdom
The conference will start at noon EDT on Thursday, July 23. The audio and visuals can be seen through the live streaming that can be accessed at https://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio
