New instrument will help confirm Kepler’s planet finds. A precision spectrograph has been designed to detect tiny radial-velocity signals induced by planets as small as Earth.

A new ground-based instrument being built by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will help NASA's planet-scouting Kepler spacecraft confirm and characterize potential alien planets.

A new instrument being built by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for use in the Canary Islands will help NASA’s planet-scouting Kepler spacecraft confirm and characterize ...

Kepler Asks: Are Other Earths Out There? March 7, 2009 / 12:08 PM EST / CBS By CBS News space consultant William Harwood. Lighting up the night sky, a Delta 2 rocket roared to life and vaulted ...

The team running NASA's Kepler planet-hunting space telescope wants to extend the mission by about four years, which would allow many more discoveries about alien worlds, researchers say.

Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find planets outside our Solar System called exoplanets. At the time, very few exoplanets had been detected, so the instrument was peering deep into the ...

But it's the full catalog of objects that Kepler appears to be tracking that's really jaw dropping. Prior to these results, we were aware of 460 exoplanets, most of them big. The typical planet ...

The Kepler instrument has 21 segmented detectors—each mapped to a certain star-filled region of sky—and the segment used to detect Kepler 452 b was known for producing crisper and clearer ...

For the past three years, there's been only one NASA-owned device in hunting for Earth-like planets. The Kepler mission has allowed scientists to look at 170,000 stars. It has been responsible for ...

Kepler-442b completes one orbit every 112 days and gets about two-thirds as much light as Earth. The scientists give it a 97 percent chance of being in the habitable zone.