Kepler Telescope Launched - In Search Of Earth-like Planets

NASA launched the Kepler telescope aboard a Delta II rocket on Friday night from Cape Canaveral. The telescope, named after 17th-century German astrophysicist Johannes Kepler, is on a mission to seek potentially habitable planets by staring at approximately 100,000 stars some 600 to 3,000 light years away in the so-called habitable zone. "If one of them has a planet like the Earth going around it and if that planet happens to pass in front of that star, the star will get just a little dimmer, then a little brighter for a while as the planet eclipses it," according to CBC's science correspondent Bob McDonald. Over the past 10 years 300 or so planets have been identified to be orbiting stars outside our solar system, but they are largely gaseous planets like Jupiter. Kepler's mission is to look for smaller Earth-like planets.

NASA sends probe to Martian North Pole

Two scientists from Dalhousie University in Halifax will have an anxious years wait as their laser probe lifted off today from Cape Canaveral in Florida aboard a Delta II rocket destined for Mars. The Phoenix Mars Lander is expected to reach Mars next spring and is equipped to study the climate of the red planet's northern pole. Odds are not in their favor however, as only 1 in 3 missions to Mars is, historically, successful. Good luck gentlemen, I'm sure that the weather here in Atlantic Canada has prepared your equipment well for its destination! CBC News Story.