The U. S. space agency NASA will launch the Kepler Mission on Friday, March 6, from Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The $600 million Kepler Mission was originally scheduled for March 5 launch, but NASA delayed the launch to conduct more tests, after the failure of its Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite last month.

Kepler Mission, named in honor of Johannes Kepler, the 17th century German scientist known for pioneering the fields of optics and planetary motion, will include the launch of the Kepler Telescope designed to discover Earth-like planets in the Milky Way.

Speaking from NASA's headquarters in Washington, D. C., the director of the agency's Astrophysics Division, Jon Morse said, "Now, 400 years later, we're using his (Johannes Kepler's) discoveries in order to answer a profound and fundamental question about our place in the universe: Are there other Earth-like planets out there?"

Morse said, "Kepler will push back the boundaries of the unknown in our patch of the Milky Way galaxy, and its discoveries may fundamentally alter humanity's view of itself."

The space agency reported that the Kepler Mission will have two launch windows tomorrow, from 10:49 - 10:52 pm and 11:13 - 11:16 pm EST. The Kepler Mission's launch vehicle will be Delta II rocket

NASA stated that the Kepler telescope is equipped with light detectors (adding up to about 95 million pixels) to determine the periodic dimming of stars caused by transiting planets. The mission researchers said that for comparison, a high-end digital camera on Earth might have 10 megapixels, but Kepler's detectors add up to
95-megapixel array. "The telescope can register changes in brightness of only 20 parts per million," NASA said.

According to NASA, the Kepler mission is expected to last for about three years and it will survey more than 100,000 sun-like stars in its search for Earth-like planets in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy. The mission could find more Earth sized planets; it could find more Sun like stars - sources of light and energy; it could find dozens of worlds like ours; however, NASA said, it may not find any "Earths" like ours.

After the last month's OCO fiasco, NASA is going very cautiously. The space agency stated that engineers have made sure that there won't be any problem with the Kepler Mission's launch tomorrow.