Sat, Feb 28, 2009
Liftoff Scheduled For March 6 At Earliest
Launch of NASA's Kepler telescope is
targeted for no earlier than Friday, March 6, from Pad 17-B at Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. There are two launch
windows, from 10:49-10:52 pm and 11:13-11:16 pm EST.
Engineers are reviewing all common hardware between the Delta II
rocket carrying the Kepler telescope and the Taurus XL launch
vehicle.
As ANN reported, on Tuesday a Taurus carrying
NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to reach orbit. Managers
want to confirm there will not be similar issues with Kepler's
Delta II.
Kepler's original March 5 target launch date was moved one day
later to accommodate the additional time for analysis. The March 6
target date still must be confirmed by the US Air Force, which
manages the eastern launch range. Kepler's Flight Readiness Review
is on Monday, March 2.
Kepler is a spaceborne telescope designed to search the nearby
region of our galaxy for Earth-size planets orbiting in the
habitable zone of stars like our sun. The habitable zone is the
region around a star where temperatures permit water to be liquid
on a planet's surface.
Liquid water is considered essential for the existence of life
as we know it. The vast majority of the approximately 300 planets
known to orbit other stars are much larger than Earth, and none is
believed to be habitable. The challenge for Kepler is to look at a
large number of stars in order to statistically estimate the total
number of Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars in the
habitable zone. Kepler will survey more than 100,000 stars in our
galaxy.
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