The Kepler mission will search for habitable planets, and determine their absolute sizes using stellar seismology.
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NASA
Kepler Mission - a search for habitable planets
In March 2009, NASA launched the Kepler satellite. This
mission is designed to discover habitable Earth-like
planets around
distant Sun-like stars. The satellite has a 0.95-m telescope with an array
of digital cameras to monitor the brightness of more than
100,000 solar-type stars
for 4-6 years.
Some of the expected planetary systems will be oriented so that the
planets might pass in front of the host star. This will cause a brief
decrease in the amount of light recorded by the satellite. The duration
and depth of such a "transit" tells us about the size of the planet
relative to the star.
In general, we will not know the size of the star. So, there will be a
revolving selection of 512 stars monitored more frequently to detect
pulsations. This will provide the absolute size of the star, and thus any
planets.
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