NASA Kepler Space Telescope

Oh man.. whatta' waste. Cool, but a logical waste.
We don't even KNOW if our MOON has ice at the pole for certain... YET THEY ARE GOING TO TELL US THAT another solar system's planet that cannot even be seen is apparently suitable for human life! Ah, how I love some of these scientists. And, do tell, what shall you do, dear fellows, should you even be able to determine that the temperature is right, and there is oxygen and water (which is an IMPOSSIBILITY, yet they state such things all the time as if it were fact)... so, what shall you do with the findings? Send a ship out there? We cannot even afford to go to the moon any time soon, let alone even MARS... it is a waste of money! Spend it on doing something that is ATTAINABLE in the next 100 years.
I say, turn that thing around to point at the earth and track terrorists or something that can actually help save lives -- I mean, you already spent the money and built it. If it were up to me, however, I would've put the money into wind power... something with a fairly immediate return in investment.

You are really dumb my friend. This satellite is designed to find the planets "blips" there is another satellite currently in development that's designed to isolate that planets spectrograph and observe it's chemical makeup. We already know it works because we were able to look at the light the moon reflects back from earth (which is extremely dim) and see water, oxygen, nitrogen and so forth.
We already new there was water on the moon and in large quantities but people need more proof. We found it during the lunar landings and simple logic and understanding would require you to acknowledge that if there is water in such enormous amounts on earth and it came from comets (most likely) then it is very likely to have been deposited on the moon as well.
I guess all I'm trying to say is... Don't make sh*t up to try and make yourself feel smart.

I'm wondering if they could also judge the distance of the planet from the sun based on the time between blips...

...oh yeah, and the speed of the planet (if they can get the info).

A_Rock, i think what he was trying to say is that... let's say we find out that there is another Earth out there in another solar system with same temps, amount of water, seasons and so on, which there definitely is a possibility of having.. Say we find this 2nd Earth.... What then? What's point? From everything I've seen so far, there is no possible way that we may ever be able to travel that far.. We are still trying to overcome hurdles to put man on Mars and finding out more and more that this might not even be possible with current technology... Another solar system is like Mars being our backyard and solar system being the sun... i mean seriously not even funny how impossible it is at this point to go to another solar system, and i doubt it will be possible for thousands of years, if that..

So why are we spending all this money trying to discover earth in another solar system when we have so many people struggling everyday just to survive with this economy to discover something that would be completely useless to us for at least thousands of years??? i mean can't we wait to do this later when things are better on our own planet?

I much rather then continue efforts in our solar system instead, things that we could possibly use in next century.

I wish people would know that they're speaking on before posting comments (yes you ymi2b). We have found water on the moon. Not that I am sure what that has to do with kepler? How can sending a probe into space to search for earth like planets and hence, perhaps, alien life, be a waste? That is what life is about! Or should be about. Constantly exploring. Bottom line, while way in the future, the Earth is going to die. Our sun will run out of power, go supernovae, and then it is bye bye Earth, and humans if we are even still around. Why keep living life as it is here on Earth? Why SHOULDN'T our goal be to explore the cosmos and create a new life on a new planet? Sounds far fetched, I know. but I am sure all the morons on our planet in 1880 though the idea of building and flying an airplane was just as impossible. Just as people in the early 1900's I am sure never imagined the idea of rocketing off Earth to talk on the moon. Anything is possible. And while were still talking about centuries in the future, I have zero doubts that we will at some point, not only discover other habitable planets, but once we get this whole nanotechnology thing down, time travel is going to be come very real, just as every other prediction Einstein made has become.

Someone said 100 years ago to Mr.Faraday : Why do you waste time with this thing you call electricity?
Where would we be if he had not.

@ Zengrath

I don't know how well you keep up with science but there have been many leaps and bounds over the past few years for man to make a possible trip to mars in just 6 months. I don't know what the consences is on this, but it sounds pretty reasonable to take people to mars and back in a 6 month time period.

You guys crack me up. Why are you bickering about the necessity of a telescope designed to search out habitable planets? Of course we don't need this probe floating out there in space. We humans do not construct these things because we need them, we build these things because we want them. Everybody thinks they are smarter than the next guy and yet we still know nothing. This world is the collective sum of our combined imaginations. We turn thought into action and action to creation until sooner or later we will have completely destroyed each other and the planet we supposedly love so dearly.

Azorus;
39 days to Mars. Check out VASIMR.
thisismyname;
the time it takes a planet to circle the star is enough, if the mass of the star is known (detectable thru color and other indicators). Any planet of any size at a given distance from a star of known mass has the same orbital period. Detecting mass is trickier; the amount of dimming would give some indication, and if the star's wobble due to the planet's pull can be seen then the masses are deducible. That's why looking for yellow stars like ours with a planet with 1 year orbit gives a good indicator of possible conditions. (Some suggestion has been made that orange stars, smaller and cooler, would have an even better chance of nurturing life because they're less violent and longer-lived. But the lower UV radiation might mean less mutation and hence slower evolution.)

Atmosphere would require getting a good spectrograph reading, as the light from the star would change slightly as it passed thru the atmosphere of the planet, and that tells you what's there. Once Kepler detects a planet, other more powerful telescopes can find it and do the detail work.