WATCH LIVE: NASA's newest space telescope launches today

JUST IN: NASA launches its newest space telescope, a tour-bus-sized observatory built to identify more than 100,000 planets beyond our solar system.

NASA just put a telescope the size of a tour bus into space.

It launched today, and its job is frankly absurd in scale. Find more than one hundred thousand planets beyond our solar system. Not stars, planets. For context, this is the agency that spent decades celebrating every single one it found, and now it's ordering them in bulk. Kennedy Space Center did the honours, and the ride up went clean.

Here's why that number matters. Kepler, the telescope that made exoplanets a household word, found a few thousand over its whole life. This one is aiming for thirty times that. Every planet on that list is a candidate in the only question anyone actually cares about, is anybody out there.

So somewhere in a catalogue of a hundred thousand worlds, there might be one looking back. That's what launched this morning.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.