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in 2000. It launched in 2009, a quarter of a century after Borucki’s first theoretical paper in
Icarus
. Natalie Batalha, who is now Borucki’s deputy principal investigator on the Kepler Mission, was in high school when he wrote the original paper. Now she has the office next door to his, and I visited her the day after I saw him.
    â€œIt really takes a unique person to create a mission like this,” she said. “Bill has this personality trait where negativity just rolls off of him. He doesn’t accept it at all. I have never seen the guy take anything personally. You get rejected and they tell you, ‘This is bad for the following reason,’ and he doesn’t take it the way most people would. He could get a major rejectionin the mail one morning and in the afternoon still have the
cojones
to go to the administrators and ask for fifty thousand dollars to build whatever. Not many people can do that. It’s incredible. It’s been a pleasure to watch that and watch his positivity and persistence. It’s been a life lesson for me. And it’s a huge part of the Kepler story.”

Chapter 2

THE MAN WHO LOOKED FOR WOBBLING STARS
    By the time Bill Borucki was feeling the full force of press and public attention weighing down on him in 2011, Geoff Marcy had already been dealing with it for fifteen years. At this point, Marcy had been interviewed for literally hundreds—probably thousands—of newspaper and magazine articles, radio and TV shows, books and documentaries. Unlike Borucki, he seemed to relish all of it. Marcy invariably comes across in these interviews as engaging, relaxed, funny. He also comes across that way in person, at scientific lectures and public talks. He’s given these by the hundreds as well, and they’re hugely popular. He has a way of conveying the excitement of discovery and a sense of awe about the universe in an impressively informal, intimate way. He seems impossible to rattle. I watched him show up at a meeting of amateur geologists one night in the VFW hall in Orinda, California, only to learn that there was no extension cord anywhere in the building (no venue seems to be beneath him, as long as the audience is genuinely interested). He couldn’t project his slides onthe screen, so he put a chair on top of a table, propped up his laptop, and mesmerized everyone in the audience even though most of them couldn’t see much of anything.
    Marcy is like the best teacher you ever had—warm, engaging, enthusiastic, funny, and ridiculously knowledgeable. Granted, he’s got an unfair advantage over some scientists in commanding your attention, given that his area of expertise isn’t, say, dung beetles, or the history of sheet metal. But he does have a way of explaining the search for planets—and, for the past decade and a half, their discovery—in a way that anyone can understand and appreciate. For his students at the University of California, Berkeley, he really is the best teacher most of them have ever had. During a visit to his office, I watched him stop and talk to a group of students, joking with them but also asking about their research projects, about which he seemed fully up to speed. I thought they were grad students; a senior professor at a major university wouldn’t normally have a lot of contact with undergrads, except in groups of one hundred or more in a large lecture room. The professor certainly wouldn’t know the students by name. But no—these were undergraduates whose mentor happened to be (until the Kepler Mission came along) the most prolific planet hunter in human history. He knew everyone’s name.
    This was not the future Geoff Marcy would have imagined for himself when he was starting out in astronomy. In 1983, the same year Bill Borucki wrote his first paper on searching for planets, Marcy found himself sinking into a depression. He was more certain every day that he would never make