The Kepler mission will search for habitable planets, and determine their absolute sizes.
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NASA
Kepler Mission - a search for habitable planets
NASA launched the Kepler satellite. This mission is trying to find
Earth-like
planets around Sun-like stars. It has a 0.95-m telescope and
many digital cameras to watch
100,000 stars for 4-6 years.
Some planets will pass in front of their star. This will cause a brief
drop in the amount of light. This will tell us the size of the planet
compared to the star.
We do not always know the size of the star. So Kepler will look more
closely at 512 stars at a time. It will look for pulsations. This will
tell us the true size of the star. Then we can find the true size of the
planet.
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