O'Donovan's goal is to find Earth-sized planets beyond our solar system, but for that he will need much more powerful telescopes. He may return to the TrES discovery in the future.
The planet is the first found in the Kepler Field, a part of the sky that will be the sole target of a NASA telescope slated for launch in 2008. The Kepler Space Telescope is designed to find Earth-like planets in orbits that favor the development of life.
The TrES network involves the Sleuth telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, the Planet Search Survey Telescope at Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, and the Stellar Astrophysics and Research on Exoplanets (Stare) telescope in the Canary Islands.
A new larger telescope, funded by the Discovery Channel, is under development at Lowell that will also be used for hunting extrasolar planets.
