Reminder 1: Kepler to launch Friday night!

A quick reminder: NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is due to launch Friday night at 10:50 p.m. Eastern time (3:50 UTC). I’ll post again tomorrow as another reminder, and I plan on live-tweeting the launch as well. The launch will be covered on NASA TV, too.

Kepler will stare at 100,000 stars over a long period of time to look for tiny, periodic dips in their brightnesses, indicating the presence of planets orbiting those stars. With Kepler, we could be on the verge of discovering hundreds of Earth-like planets in the galaxy.