March 5, 2009 3:57 PM PST
But before a spacecraft can fly, there's a lot of work to be done. This view shows the solar array side of the nearly completed Kepler construction.
The business end of Kepler is its photometer, a 0.95-meter telescope with a field of view of 105 square degrees--"comparable," NASA says, "to the area of your hand held at arm's length." Such a relatively large field of view for an astronomical telescope is needed so that Kepler can monitor the brightness of 100,000 stars.
Photo by NASA and Ball Aerospace
Caption by Jonathan Skillings
