Kepler

          Kepler is a satellite that was launched March 7^th 2009 and has found many extrasolar planets; some have been confirmed while others have yet to be confirmed. The Doppler Wobble method could be used to confirm if these detected exoplanets are actually planets. This satellite was set up into the sky and it points at the same patch of stars night after night. The aim of this mission is to explore the structures of planetary systems. Kepler has been very instrumental in finding exoplanets using the transit techniques. This method has been more successful since the satellites are above the atmosphere and are able to get better images. 

Figure obtained from: http://blog.professorastronomy.com/2010/06/too-many-planets.html

        One can see from the image above that the ground based telescopes the image of the transit is not as well defined as the Kepler measurement.  So far Kepler has confirmed 25 planets and has 1235 planet candidates, this tally can be found on NASA’s webpage that is designated for Kepler. One of the confirmed planets that Kepler has found is Kepler-14b. This is a huge discovery because it is the smallest planet that has ever been discovered outside of our solar system. It is a rocky planet and is only 1.4 times the size of Earth. This discovers was based on data that was collected from May 2009 to January 2010. They first found Kepler-10 and it was a star that NASA identified as a possible star that could harbour a small transiting planet and this made it a priority. Even though the discovered this planet that is the closet planet to Earth in size that has been found they noted that it orbits Kepler-10 once every 0.84 days this means that the planet is 20 times closer to its star then Mercury. This means that Kepler-10-b is not habitable. With the large amount of candidate planets that Kepler has discovered I feel that it is just a matter of time before we find planets that may be possible to harbour life. 

Information obtained from:

http://kepler.nasa.gov/

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/rocky_planet.html