This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Swinburn Astronomy Online, the world's longest running online astronomy degree program.

Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.

Astronomy Cast Episode 190 for Monday, May 17, 2010. The Kepler Mission.

Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cane, I'm the publisher of the universe today and with me is Dr. Pamela Gaye, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Eboso.

I Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing okay. It's been an amazingly stormy, scary, awful weather day, but we finally got to record.

During the summers, we always have to do our recordings in between tornado warnings. If you go back to people like go back to our archive and like, oh yeah, in the summer then they were dodging tornadoes and then the year before.

So that really is our your summer pastime is to somehow get work done while nature is trying to tear your city apart.

Yes, this is why backup systems and laptops with nine hour batteries are both useful things and if you can couple it with a 3G wireless, you can weather it out in the basement.

Right, you stop shilling for the networks unless they want to pay us and then we'll shill for them.

All right, so last week we studied Kepler, the man and this week we take on Kepler, the mission launched in March 2009.

This is the spacecraft designed to search for earth sized planets orbiting other stars.

So let's take a look at the history of this mission, the launch and the science gathered so far.

I like this kind of one because the space craft is already up, it's safely launched, it's operating, it's already got some science data.

The best is yet to come so we can, you know, we can both talk about things that have already happened, but also, you know, predictive future, which is always great.

So and it's also, I don't know, it's as I mentioned in the last episode, it's not that connected to Kepler, except I guess he learned a lot about planets.

Well, it yeah, he's kind of the originator of the whole planet idea.

So yeah, it's it's cool.

All right, so then let's go back on the sort of the history of the mission and the sort of the science that's that's coming together here.

Well, the idea for the Kepler mission actually originated in the 1980s.

The idea probably originated well before that, but they started pulling together the science team, assigning roles, writing up white papers.

...