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At the time of this writing the Kepler spacecraft is ten days into its six-year mission, about 250,000 miles away from Earth. Moving at a rapid speed of 10 million miles a year, the NASA spacecraft is carrying one of NASA's largest cameras that has ever been beyond the orbit of Earth, capable of finding Earth-like sized planets located in a habitable zone. Built by the Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, the Kepler photometer and NASA spacecraft were developed through previous NASA mission ingenuity: Spitzer Space Telescope, Deep Impact and the Hubble Space Telescope. An important aspect of the camera is to observe the brightness of the field every couple of hours without anything in the way of the field of view (FOV). According to NASA, what this means is that the camera needs to avoid the sun with the FOV out of the ecliptic plane while also having the largest number of stars. 

Ball Aerospace has supported critical missions through the Department of Defense, NASA, NOAA, and other United States government and commercial entities, along with a wide assortment of technology for "numerous technological and scientific firsts" in spacecraft, components, advanced instruments and sensors, data exploitation systems, and RF solutions for applications—scientific, strategic, and tactical. What makes the Kepler NASA spacecraft photometer stand out is that not only is it the largest simple camera NASA has sent into orbit but it is a single purpose instrument, consisting of a Schmidt telescope design pointed at a single group of stars for four years of its six-year mission while recording data. I know…a long sentence. But what it basically means is that photographing large areas of the sky such as large celestial areas, and is pretty much mandatory.

Designed by Bernhard Schmidt in the year 1930, an optician who worked in the Hamburg Observatory in Bergedorf, Germany, it consisted of a catadioptric telescope with the Schmidt telescope having a "spherical-shaped primary mirror" with Schmidt introducing a correcting plate (thin lens) at its radius of curvature which gave it a field of several degrees in diameter. The Kepler spacecraft itself was named after Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality where he successfully learned the ideas of Copernicus. While he was a math teacher in 1596, he was known for writing the first outspoken defense of the Copernican system, the "Mysterium Cosmographicum".  In 1609, he published the "Astronomia Nova" which are his first two laws of planetary motion.

As stated the Kepler Mission's objective is to explore the planetary systems—its structure and its diversity—achieved by surveying a large sample of stars. This will be done with several methods:

·         Estimation will be done on how many planets exist in multiple star systems.

·         A determination will be done on the orbit shapes and the size distribution.

·         Another determination is done on terrestrial and large planet percentages near or in the habitable zones.

·         Find out how many varieties there are of orbit sizes and planet information (sizes, masses, densities, and reflectivities) of short-period giant planets.

·         The properties need to be determined of any stars that harbor planetary systems.