Dust cover jettisoned from Kepler telescope
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - 07:56
in Astronomy & Space
Engineers have successfully ejected the dust cover from NASA's Kepler telescope, a spaceborne mission soon to begin searching for worlds like Earth. 'The cover released and flew away exactly as we designed it to do,' said Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'This is a critical step toward answering a question that has come down to us across 100 generations of human history - are there other planets like Earth, or are we alone in the galaxy?'...