Morning, Kepler! NASA's Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Wakes Up Again

The Kepler roller-coaster ride continues. NASA's low-on-fuel Kepler space telescope, which has discovered more than 2,650 alien planets to date, has awoken from yet another slumber and begun making science observations again, agency officials announced today (Sept. 5). The $600 million Kepler mission launched in March 2009, tasked with determining how common Earth-like planets are around the galaxy. The spacecraft initially studied more than 150,000 stars simultaneously, looking for tiny brightness dips caused by the passage of orbiting planets across these stars' faces. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

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