NASA’s Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday on a three-year mission to find Earth’s twin, a Goldilocks planet where it’s neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold. The Delta II rocket, carrying the widest-field telescope ever put in space, lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time. The launch vehicle headed downrange, gathering speed as its three stages ignited, one after the other, passing over the Caribbean island of Antigua and tracking stations in Australia before climbing into orbit. Kepler will eventually settle down to scan tens of thousands of stars near the constellations Cygnus and Lyra in search of planets where water could exist on the surface in liquid form, a key condition for life as we know it. ‘We have a feeling like we’re about to set sail across an ocean to discover a new world,’ said project manager Jim Fanson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. ‘It’s sort of the same feeling Columbus or Magellan must have had.’ The $590-million Kepler mission is jointly managed by JPL and NASA’s Ames Research […]