NASA's recently launched Kepler space telescope mission-whose main goal is to find rocky, Earthlike planets in stars' habitable zones-has successfully located five new exoplanets(太陽系外惑星), planets that exist outside our solar system, that are about the same mass as Jupiter and orbit very close to their host stars.
While none of these planets resemble Earth, astronomers find the results encouraging, as they indicate that the device is working as expected to locate new planets.