One year ago Saturday, NASA's Kepler spacecraft, built in Boulder by Ball Aerospace, was successfully launched into the night sky to search for planets that could be similar to our own -- other worlds that might support life.

Kepler's gaze is fixed on 100,000 stars in the universe. The onboard instruments are constantly measuring the brightness of the stars, recording any dips in light intensity, which could signify that a planet has traveled in front of the star during its orbit.

The degree of dimming tells scientists how large the planet is, and the time between the dips in light intensity tells scientists how long the planet's orbit is, and therefore how far away the planet is from its sun.

For a planet to be habitable -- with conditions that could support liquid water -- the planet has to be similar to Earth in both size and orbit length. Now, scientists are looking to identify the first of the possible Earth-like planets: those that first created a dip in their star's intensity a year ago.


"The spacecraft is doing exactly what it's designed to do," said John Troeltzsch, Ball's program manager for Kepler. "I think in the next year, we're going to make some announcements of the first Earth-sized planets."

And while there hasn't been time yet to find and confirm planets that might be habitable, Kepler has discovered other planets with much shorter orbits. In January, mission scientists announced that five massive planets -- some even larger than Jupiter -- had been discovered, all of which orbit their stars in fewer than five days.

Now, scientists are finding smaller, more Earth-sized planets that are also very quickly orbiting their stars. The discovery was made possible, in part, by a software upgrade at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, where Kepler's data is collected.

"The scientists are just giddy," Troeltzsch said.

Every three-and-a-half days, the computers onboard Kepler check in with Earth. And when Kepler talks, it's students at the University of Colorado who listen.

Mission operations for Kepler are based out of CU's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, which depends on students to monitor communications from four satellites and Kepler.

Students are responsible for checking Kepler's systems and making sure that everything is running smoothly. And while there have been no major concerns with Kepler, the spacecraft operates under tight parameters.

"In mission operations, boring is better," said Jake Binney, a senior in aerospace engineering who works as a Kepler command controller.
