More Kepler Missions?

[Airbrush]

Since the Kepler Mission search for other earth-like planets is such an efficient method, why not send up more? Technology is always improving. Within a few more years a more powerful Kepler-style telescope can detect even smaller planets.

 

"Kepler is a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. The spacecraft, named in honor of the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, was launched on 7 March 2009, and has been active for 3 years, 9 months and 20 days as of December 27, 2012.

 

"The Kepler mission is "specifically designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets."Kepler's only instrument is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view. This data is transmitted to Earth, then analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by extrasolar planets that cross in front of their host star. Kepler is part of NASA's Discovery Program of relatively low-cost, focused primary science missions."

 

Here is my questions about Kepler. Of the 145,000 stars in Kepler's field of vision, how far away are they? Are they all roughly the same distance from us, or are they a wide range of distances from us? If they are a wide range of distances from us, how far away are the nearest and most distant?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_mission

Edited December 29, 2012 by Airbrush