Kepler Science.mpg file

The animation shows several planets in orbit around different stars far off in our galaxy. 

Each planet casts a moving shadow as it orbits its parent star. If one were close enough 
to the planet to be inside the shadow, this would appear as an eclipse. 

Since our solar system is at a great distance from any other planetary system we only 
see the small dimming when this happens.

We now zoom back from the 100,000 stars being monitored, which are about 1000 
light-years away.

The Kepler spacecraft watching those stars will record the periodic faint change in 
brightness produced by orbiting planets. The light from the stars is focussed by the 
optics onto an array of charged coupled devices (CCD), similar to every camcorder and 
digital camera.  

In this way the Kepler scientists hope to discover many hundreds of habitable 
planets. From the data the scientists can calculate the size of the planet and the 
orbit around the distant star. Some of planets may turn out to be just like Earth.


The animation was created by artist Roger Arno

Additional details about the Kepler Mission can be found at:
http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov

Kepler jpeg images are available at: http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/downloading.html