William J. Borucki

William Borucki is a space scientist (retired) at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He received a MSc in physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1962 and then moved to NASA Ames where he first worked on research for the development of the heat shield for the Apollo Mission in the Hypersonic Free Flight Branch. After the successful Moon landings, he transferred to the Theoretical Studies Branch where he investigated lightning activity in planetary atmospheres and contributed to the development of mathematical models to predict the effects of nitric oxides and chlorofluoromethanes on the Earth’s ozone layer. In 1984, he began advocating the development of a space mission that could detect Earth-size planets and determine the frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. In the succeeding years he developed the techniques required to find such small planets and showed that the technology and analysis techniques were sufficiently mature to proceed to flight status. He served as the Science Principal Investigator for the Kepler Mission. The Mission was designed to determine the frequency of terrestrial planets orbiting in- and-near the habitable zones of other stars. It used high-precision photometry to monitor the brightness of over 150,000 stars to search for transits caused by orbiting planets, was launched on March 6, 2009, and completed its main and extended missions in 2018. It discovered over 2700 planets and found that most stars have planets and many planets are Earth-sized.