Are we alone in the universe and are there Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way? In 2009, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope to answer these questions. Jason Steffen, a former member of the science team on the mission, traces Kepler from the take-off of the rocket that sent it into space to the revelations of the data that flowed back to a supercomputer at NASA—evidence of strange new worlds unlike anything found in our own solar system.
