The weather in Florida looks good for NASA's Kepler spacecraft launch, scheduled for Friday night. Kepler will orbit the sun behind Earth. Its optical equipment will gaze constantly at distant stars in an attempt to spot planets with conditions resembling those on Earth.
NASA will soon be on the lookout for possible Earths in one faraway corner of the galaxy.
A planet-hunting spacecraft, named "Kepler" after the German 17th-century astrophysicist, is scheduled to rocket away from Cape Canaveral, Fla., late Friday night. Excellent launch weather is forecast.
The telescope will spend 3 1/2 years staring at roughly 100,000 stars, measuring their brightness and any winks in the light that might signify orbiting planets.
"We certainly won't find E.T., but we might find E.T.'s home by looking at all of these stars," Bill Boruki, Kepler's principal scientist, said Thursday.
Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for science, said Kepler is not just another science mission.
"It very possibly could tell us that Earths are very, very common, that we have lots of neighbors out there, or it could tell us that Earths are really, really, really rare," Weiler said at a press conference.
"Perhaps we're the only Earth. I think that would be a very bad answer because I, for one, don't want to live in an empty universe where we're the best there is. That's a scary thought to many of us."
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