This NASA planet hunter is searching for worlds just like Earth

The goal of the craft is to assemble a map of 85 per cent of the sky and to suss out planets that are roughly 1 to 1.5 times the size of Earth

Just 25 years ago, no one knew for sure whether the stars dotting our night skies had anything circling them that resembled planets, let alone one like Earth.

Then came a NASA planet-seeker called Kepler, which starting in 2009 began finding intriguing, tell-tale blips around stars other than our sun. Almost everywhere its cameras looked, a new blip was discovered, signifying a rich abundance of “exoplanets.” Kepler’s prodigious planet-spotting — more than 1,000 of the 3,700 discovered to date — was among the first astronomical endeavours to show that the basic pattern of our solar system appears to be common elsewhere.

Now,