It’s a question that the human race has been asking for centuries and one that NASA’s Roger Hunter and his team of more than 80 technicians, engineers and scientists are now trying to answer.

As the manager of the Kepler Space Telescope Project, Hunter leads NASA’s first mission to search our galaxy for Earth-size planets orbiting in habitable zones of their stars — the region around a star where temperatures permit water to be liquid on a planet’s surface. This condition is essential for the existence of life as we know it. 

“Are we alone? What is our place in the universe? “Is there another Earth? If so, how many are there?”

Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope, named after astronomer Johannes Kepler who developed the laws of planetary motion, is the largest telescope launched into deep space beyond Earth’s orbit.

“Kepler is the best little planet finder ever made,” said Hunter.

During Kepler’s three and a half year mission, the telescope is examining a star field between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, Hunter said this region was chosen due to its large number of sun-like stars, and its accessibility to the northern hemisphere by ground-based telescopes for follow-up observation.

The Kepler Telescope detects planets as they pass in front of their stars, causing a tiny dip in the stars’ light. From the change in brightness across the stars, NASA scientists can then measure the size of the planet, and according to Hunter, “we can do a good calculation of the orbital period and the estimated surface temperature of the planet.”

The Kepler mission just confirmed its first planet, Keppler-22b. In Kepler’s first 134 days of observation, 1,235 planet candidates were detected with many the size of Jupiter or bigger. Hunter said about 54 of those planets are estimated to be in the habitable zone of the stars they orbit and 68 of the 1,235 are Earth-size.

To “put these discoveries into context, only 500 planets had been found out of our Solar System before Kepler,” said Hunter. “Kepler does an amazing job looking at these stars. Astronomers are saying that they will have to rewrite our textbooks because of what Kepler is finding.”

“I think this mission will change the way people will view themselves on the planet and give us a new appreciation for the planet that we live on,” he added.

As Kepler’s project manager, Hunter oversees a team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California as well as at three other operation centers. This includes the Mission Operations Center in Boulder, Colo., which collects data from the Kepler Telescope each month. Once the data is collected, the information is shared with about 35 scientists who are scattered around the world and who help Hunter and his staff analyze the data and locate possible planets.

Dwight Sanderfer, the science operations center manager at Ames Research Center, said Hunter is very effective.

“Roger is a great project manager. What I like about Roger is that he goes around and talks to everyone and gets to know everyone on a personal level,” said Sanderfer.

“He also understands all the technical levels of the project and has a very good open door policy about issues and problems,” Sanderfer added.

Hunter gained this technical expertise serving in the U.S. Air Force for 22 years, where many of his assignments were in the space operations field and in global positioning systems. After retiring from the military, Hunter worked at the Department of Defense and at Boeing before being tapped in 2008 to lead the Kepler mission.

Hunter, who grew up in rural Georgia where he could “see a gazillion stars,” said he has always had an interest in astronomy and has been “awed by the beauty of what was out there.”

So when the opportunity to lead a mission “where you get to find another Earth came up, it got my attention immediately [and] appealed to my scientific curiosity,” said Hunter.

And Hunter’s first look through the Kepler Telescope did not disappoint him.

“Kepler’s first view of the heavens was filled with stars. It just looked through the vacuum of space out to thousands of light years away and you could see millions of stars, including other galaxies and star clusters. It is an amazing telescope,” said Hunter.