This Monday, Dec. 5, NASA will be releasing their discoveries from the Kepler Satellite. The week long conference would contain a briefing of an update on the statistical findings since last Kepler's Feb. 1, 2011 report. The conference would be held in Moffett Field, California.

For a taste of what this conference will bring, NASA has released their finding of a new Earth-sized planet orbiting a star 352 light years away. The planet was named Kepler-21b and the star it is orbiting named HD 179070. The planet and star is just one of the hundreds of planets and stars found by the satellite orbiting Earth.

The planet found, though Earth-sized, is inhospitable to life because of its surface temperature of 1627° C (297° F). The temperature was due to it only being 3.7 million miles or 5.6 mega meters from the star it is orbiting. Kepler-21b is 1.6 times bigger than Earth, earning it a classification of Super Earth. While it is bigger than Earth by only 1.6 times, the planet is ten times denser and massive than our planet.

The star the planet is orbiting is reported to be 2.8 billion years old, younger to our son by 2.2 billion years, and is a bit hotter and brighter than the sun. Although we needed the Kepler to discover the planet, the star itself can be seen by binoculars or a small telescope.

The discovery took 65 scienists, 15 months, the Kepler and the Kitt Peak telescopes to accurately measure the planet.

Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone" where water can exist. The satellite detects planets and possible candidates and may perhaps find other living beings outside our planet. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission. The Discovery Program is NASA's series of low-cost purely scientific missions to explore our solar system.

After the news briefing, the Kepler Science Conference opens from Dec. 5 to 9 at Ames to highlight past scientific results. There would be more than 90 presentations on exoplanet science and stellar astrophysics in the conference. Astrophysicists and other space enthusiasts can find programs and schedules in NASA's Kepler website.