The Dimming of a Porch Light
Reading this made me happy:
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is ready to be moved to the launch pad today and will soon begin a journey to search for worlds that could potentially host life.
[…]
The mission will spend three and a half years surveying more than 100,000 sun-like stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy. It is expected to find hundreds of planets the size of Earth and larger at various distances from their stars. If Earth-size planets are common in the habitable zone, Kepler could find dozens; if those planets are rare, Kepler might find none.
In the end, the mission will be our first step toward answering a question posed by the ancient Greeks: are there other worlds like ours or are we alone?
[…]
“If Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front,” said James Fanson, Kepler project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The original press release is on the NASA website, here, and you can find more information on the Kepler mission on Wikipedia, here, and also on the official website.
Who comes up with these fantastically poetic metaphors? “It would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front.” Lovely.