Kepler, at last

Yes, Kepler has been launched, at last, and safely, thank goodness.

Unlike other exo-planet search tools, it will be able to watch a hundred thousand stars at once, looking for flickers in their star light that might indicate a planet passing infront of them.

This will be the first mission that will have a decent chance of detecting an Earth sized planet orbiting in a "habitable zone", a distance from a star where water could in liquid form. As such a planet would have to pass infron of the star twice before we can calculate it's orbit, we will probably have to wait a year and a half before the first confirmed sightings.

Well worth the wait, though.