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Everything continues to look good with 60 minutes left in the countdown for the launch of Kepler aboard a Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral.

Kepler will stare at the same part of the sky for more than three years, carefully measuring the brightness of 100,000 stars. The observatory will catch the moments when planets pass in front of their stars and detect the worlds blinking out the starlight. The data will tell scientists the size and orbit of the discovered planet.

"Trying to detect Jupiter-size planets crossing in front of their stars is like trying to measure the effect of a mosquito flying by a car's headlight. Finding Earth-sized planets is like trying to detect a very tiny flea in that same headlight," said Jim Fanson, the Kepler project manager.

# Debra Fischer, professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University explains what is expected during the Kepler mission: "What I'm hoping, expecting to see as a community scientist is in the first six months to a year, the big, massive hot Jupiters are going to roll off the Kepler assembly line. This is exciting because these are bizarre planets. We don't really understand the statistics, how they form, how they moved into their current position and just the sheer number of these objects that Kepler will find is going to help us learn a lot about the systems." # "And then the next class of planets I think will roll out will be perhaps the hot Neptunes...Significantly smaller than Jupiter, these objects are thought to exist around something like 30 percent of stars like our sun and low-mass stars. And if that is correct, then Kepler should see quite a few of these very large, something like 17 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting." # "And then the hardest detection and by far the most exciting is going to be the detection of bona fide Earths -- small, rocky planets, Earth-size planets."

Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, adds:

"This is why I call Kepler our planetary census taker. We're going to get the full sweep of the types of planets in different types of orbits around different types of stars through a big cross-section of our galaxy....It is going to shape the way that we formulate our plans for future missions on our quest to find Earth-like planets and study their atmospheres and look for the bio-markers like the types of molecules in our atmosphere that may indicate life."