Scientists Discover “Earth 2.0″ Via Kepler Space Telescope. Since it’s launch on March 7, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been busy collecting data about our galaxy with an interest in finding habitable planets like ours. Today, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced the spacecraft has done precisely that.

Surveying the Milky Way, Kepler has located a planet much like our own, an “Earth 2.0,” which they’ve named Kepler-452b. BBC reports that scientists say it may be the first planet we’ve discovered that’s most similar to Earth in its distance from its sun, as well as its size.

Kepler has discovered no fewer than 500 possible planets on its mission, though only 12 of them are of interest to scientists for their orbit around parent stars which would allow water to exist on their surfaces. Scientists are unsure as to whether its surface is rocky like Earth’s, and further exploration is need. But the news is a fascinating nonetheless.

“The other Kepler habitable zone planets that have been discovered so far tend to be orbiting M-dwarfs — stars far cooler than our sun, and therefore the planets need to orbit much closer to receive the same levels of heating,” Queen’s University Belfast researcher Dr. Chris Watson told BBC. “So it may be a potentially rocky super-Earth in an Earth-like orbit (in terms of host star and orbital distance). It’s this combination of the host star and orbit that set it apart in my opinion.”

NASA said that its Kepler spacecraft has spotted "Earth's bigger, older cousin": the first nearly Earth-size planet to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our own. Though NASA can't say for sure whether the planet is rocky like ours or has water and air, it's the closest match yet found.

The planet, Kepler-452b, is about 1,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. It's about 60% bigger than Earth, NASA says, and is located in its star's habitable zone -- the region where life-sustaining liquid water is possible on the surface of a planet.

A visitor there would experience gravity about twice that of Earth's, and planetary scientists say the odds of it having a rocky surface are "better than even." While it's a bit farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, its star is brighter, so the planet gets about the same amount of energy from its star as Earth does from the sun. And that sunlight would be very similar to Earth's, Jenkins said.

The planet "almost certainly has an atmosphere," Jenkins said, although scientists can't say what it's made of. But if the assumptions of planetary geologists are correct, he said, Kepler-452b's atmosphere would probably be thicker than Earth's, and it would have active volcanoes.

It takes 385 days for the planet to orbit its star, very similar to Earth's 365-day year, NASA said. And because it's spent so long orbiting in this zone -- 6 billion years -- it's had plenty of time to brew life, Jenkins said.

Before the discovery of this planet, one called Kepler-186f was considered the most Earth-like, according to NASA. That planet, no more than a 10th bigger than Earth, is about 500 light-years away from us. But it gets only about a third of the energy from its star as Earth does from the sun, and noon there would look similar to the evening sky here, NASA says.

The $600 million Kepler mission launched in 2009 with a goal to survey a portion of the Milky Way for habitable planets. From a vantage point 64 million miles from Earth, it scans the light from distant stars, looking for almost imperceptible drops in a star's brightness, suggesting a planet has passed in front of it.

It has discovered more than 1,000 planets. Twelve of those, including Kepler-425b, have been less than twice the size of Earth and in the habitable zones of the stars they orbit.

Missions are being readied to move scientists closer to the goal of finding yet more planets and cataloging their atmospheres and other characteristics.

In 2017, NASA plans to launch a planet-hunting satellite called TESS that will be able to provide scientists with more detail on the size, mass and atmospheres of planets circling distant stars. The next year, the James Webb Space Telescope will go up. That platform, NASA says, will provide astonishing insights into other worlds, including their color, seasonal differences, weather and even the potential presence of vegetation.