NASA's Kepler Spacecraft Ready to Ship to Florida

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Michael Mewhinney 650-604-3937
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Michael.mewhinney@nasa.gov

News release: 2008-240 Dec. 18, 2008

NASA's Kepler Spacecraft Ready to Ship to Florida

PASADENA, Calif. -- Engineers are getting ready to pack NASA's Kepler spacecraft into a
container and ship it off to its launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

The mission, scheduled to launch on March 5, will seek to answer an age-old question -- are there
other Earths in space?

"Kepler is ready to begin its journey to its launch site, and ultimately to space, where it will answer
a question that has been pondered by humankind at least as long ago as the ancient Greeks,"
said James Fanson, the project manager for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif.

Kepler will monitor more than 100,000 stars for signatures of planets of various sizes and orbital
distances. It has the ability to locate rocky planets like Earth, including those that lie in a star's
"habitable zone," a region where liquid water, and perhaps life, could exist. If these Earth-size
worlds do exist around stars like our sun, Kepler is expected to be the first to find them, and the
first to measure their frequency.

"Kepler's mission is to determine whether Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of other stars
are frequent or rare; whether life in our Milky Way galaxy is likely to be frequent or rare," said
William Borucki, the Kepler science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in
Moffett Field, Calif.

Kepler is currently at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. It passed all its
environmental tests ensuring that it is prepared for the harsh trip to space. It also passed what's
called the "pre-ship review," meaning that it is ready to be shipped via convoy to Florida in early
January. Its first stop will be Astrotech in Titusville, Fla., where the spacecraft will be processed
before being carried to its launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Kepler will launch atop a Delta II rocket.

"An outstanding team of engineers overcame some difficult hurdles to achieve this considerable
milestone," said Ball Aerospace Program Manager John Troeltzsch. "The culmination of this effort
will put a spectacular mission in orbit designed to increase our understanding of the cosmos."

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission. In addition to being the home organization of the science
principal investigator, NASA Ames Research Center is responsible for the ground system
development, mission operations and science data analysis. Kepler mission development is
managed by JPL. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. is responsible for developing the Kepler
flight system and supporting mission operations.

More information about the Kepler mission is at http://www.nasa.gov/kepler . More information
about extrasolar planets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

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