ater, saying, we've checked all the electronics and everything's ready. Let's see if the cover will come off. Sometimes those mechanical things stick, and that's the end of the mission. It was a thrilling time. The cover came off and we got first lightwe saw the stars through it. Wonderful.
What do you plan to do with the Kepler mission next? What do you hope to find?
What the mission is designed for, and I'm going to be a little facetious here, is to be the most boring mission ever launched. It simply takes images every 6 seconds of the skythe same part of the sky, the same group of stars, over and over again. And that is so wonderful. We get this marvelous data set, and the longer you look, the smaller the planets you find. The longer you look, the more planets you find in the habitable zone. This is just the most marvelous mission that has ever been launched. Hubble Space Telescope is a small candle compared to the light of this mission. Year after year, we'll be finding more planets, more planetary systems. And we'll find out the answer to the question "Are earths common?" Are earths in the habitable zone common? And if the answer is yes, life is probably common, too. And that means that we can move forward to new missions that go and explore those planets and find life on those planets.