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This NASA planet hunter is searching for worlds just like Earth The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is tentatively scheduled to launch on April 16 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and focus on stars nearer than those analysed by NASA’s planet-seeker Kepler. Photo: NASA Just 25 years ago, no one knew for sure whether the stars dotting our night skies had anything circling them that resembled planets, let alone one like  Earth. Then came a  NASA  planet-seeker called Kepler, which starting in 2009 began finding intriguing, tell-tale blips around stars other than our sun. Almost everywhere its cameras looked, a new blip was discovered, signifying a rich abundance of “exoplanets.” Kepler’s prodigious planet-spotting — more than 1,000 of the 3,700 discovered to date — was among the first astronomical endeavours to show that the basic pattern of our solar system appears to be common elsewhere. Now, the successor to  Kepler  is here. This pl...