NASA's Kepler Mission: A Search for Habitable Planets

The Kepler Mission, launched in March of this year, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earthsize 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.