The Discovery Program is very pleased to welcome the two new projects, Dawn and Kepler, which were approved for continuation by the Office of Space Science today. We would like to congratulate Dr. Borucki, Dr. Russell and their respective teams for the hard work that they've done so far. We look forward to working with them to make their proposals a reality.

Dawn, a mission slated for launch in 2006, will orbit the two largest asteroids in our solar system, and Kepler, a spaceborne telescope, also scheduled for launch in 2006, will search for Earth-like planets around stars beyond our solar system.

"Kepler and Dawn are exactly the kind of missions NASA should be launching, missions which tackle some of the most important questions in science yet do it for a very modest cost," said Dr. Edward Weiler, associate administrator for space science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.. "It's an indicator of how far we've come in our capability to explore space when missions with such ambitious goals are proposed for the Discovery Program of lower cost missions rather than as major projects costing ten times as much."

The Dawn mission will make a nine-year journey to orbit the two most massive asteroids in the solar system, Vesta and Ceres -- two "baby planets" very different from each other yet both containing tantalizing clues about the formation of our solar system. Located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Vesta and Ceres have very different properties. Using the same set of instruments to observe both of these bodies, Dawn will improve our understanding of how the planets formed during the earliest epoch of our solar system.

Led by principal investigator Dr. Christopher T. Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles, the project is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va., will develop the spacecraft.

"With its cutting-edge capability, Kepler may help us answer one of the most enduring questions humans have asked throughout history: are there others like us in the universe?" said principal investigator William Borucki of Ames research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., the leader of the mission.

The Kepler Mission is different from previous ways of looking for planets which has led to the discovery of about 80 Jupiter-sized planets about 300 times more massive than Earth. Kepler will look for the 'transit' signature of planets which occurs each time a planet crosses the line-of-sight between the planet's parent star that it is orbiting and the observer. When this happens, the planet blocks some of the light from its star, resulting in a periodic dimming. This periodic signature is used to detect the planet and to determine its size and its orbit. Kepler will continuously fix its gaze at a region of space containing 100,000 stars and will be able to determine if Earth-sized planets makes a transit across any of the stars.

The Kepler team includes 25 scientists from 16 institutions in the U.S. and Canada. The industrial partner for development of the hardware is Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

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