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However, the most exciting mission in the International Year of Astronomy may well be the NASA Discovery Mission called Kepler. NASA intends to send a probe into space capable of finding small planets like Earth that have the possibility of supporting life. The Kepler telescope is looking for planet in the habitable zone of their stars or at distances that allow oceans to exist.
A date, more than two hundred extra solar planet have been found, but none of these discoveries is a planet similar to the Earth. The fact is that it is very difficult to detect a planet as small as Earth in orbit around a distant star. In addition, this faint planet light appears to be so close to the much brighter star that they are almost impossible to tell apart.
Kepler will be a space-based probe with a cost of over five hundred fifty million dollars. It will use state of the art technology optical interferometry that has been refined only within the last two decades.
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