Kepler has been performing well and has been making science observations since recovery from safe mode on Jan. 27, 2013. Last January the flight team placed the observatory in a precautionary wheel rest safe…

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Tiny Planet System (Source NASA) – The Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around…

A New Approach to Search for Earth-like Worlds The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) is now searching for Earth-like worlds. The PHL maintains the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog (HEC) in which exoplanets…

(Source – NASA) Using publicly available data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) estimate that six percent of red dwarf stars in the…

The number of potentially habitable exoplanets will be impacted A team of astronomers from Penn State led by Ravi Kumar Kopparapu and Ramses Ramírez, also PHL collaborators, announced a redefinition of…

The Kepler spacecraft, NASA’s lead planet finder has returned to operations and is once again planet hunting. After a “wheel rest” safe mode that began on January 17, 2013, NASA’s…

The Kepler observatory has stopped it’s science data operations due to concern about a second reaction wheel issue. Reaction wheels are used to point the observatory and are critical to…

This figure shows an actual image of a sunset on Earth compared to artistic representations for the best candidates of potential habitable worlds so far. The image corrects for the…