Spinning around in space, Kepler, the telescope launched in March this year to go and seek out extrasolar planets, is working just fine. And to prove it, the researchers running the mission have a paper in Science.

The data was all taken during ten days of the craft’s commissioning phase, and shows that it is sensitive to measuring the atmosphere of planets around other stars. There are the pictures – light curves of the planet HAT-P-7b, a planet about 1000 light years away from us. The measurements mean that Kepler can do what it set out to do – and that is to see a planet transiting, or passing in front of its star (MIT press release).

This bodes well for the future of the mission, and maybe, just maybe, it will bring us news of another world like ours before the year is out.