Space mission blasts off to seek out alien life

Published on Wednesday 4 March 2009 21:18

THE United States space agency Nasa is to launch a £428 million hunt for faraway worlds that may harbour alien life.

The Kepler telescope, due to blast off from Florida tomorrow, will search for other terrestrial planets where water – and therefore life – could exist.

Bill Borucki, of Nasa, said: "Kepler may help us answer one of the most enduring questions humans have asked throughout history: are there others like us in the universe?"

The craft, named after 17th-century German scientist Johannes Kepler,

will look at a region of the sky located between two constellations – Cygnus the swan and Lyra – where a total of 3.5 million stars lie. Nasa has selected 100,000 of those stars, programming the telescope to "stare" at them constantly for the duration of the mission to monitor their brightness.

The area is known as the "Goldilocks zone", because conditions there are not too hot, not too cold, but just right for liquid water to exist.

When a planet passes in front of the star, the brightness will dim. By measuring the precise scale and length of the fluctuation, scientists will be able to calculate the planet's size and temperature, and whether it is potentially habitable.