Why did you name the Kepler Mission after the German astronomer Johannes Kepler?
NASA’s Kepler Mission was named in honor of Johannes Kepler because he was the first person to describe the motions of planets about the Sun in such a way that their positions could be precisely predicted. He derived three laws of planetary motion from observational data taken by Tycho Brahe. Kepler’s first two laws of planetary motion were published in 1609, 400 years prior to launch. Ten years later, he published his third law of planetary motion, which describes how the orbital period (year) of a planet is proportional to the semimajor axis (distance) from the Sun. The fact that Johannes Kepler derived his laws from data made him the first astrophysicist, and the Kepler Mission honors him for this accomplishment. The Mission also uses Kepler’s third law to determine the size of planetary orbits from the periods discovered by observing repeated transits. G.
