![]() The resurrected mission became known as K2 and yielded 350 confirmed exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, on top of what the telescope had already uncovered since its March 7, 2009, launch from Cape Canaveral. “It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,” said retired NASA scientist William Boruki, who led the original Kepler science team. “Now we know because of the Kepler Space Telescope and its science mission that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy.”Īlmost lost in 2013 because of equipment failure, Kepler was salvaged by engineers and kept peering into the cosmos, thick with stars and galaxies, ever on the lookout for dips in in the brightness of stars that could indicate an orbiting planet. “It has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos,” said NASA’s astrophysics director Paul Hertz. ![]() It even helped to uncover last year a solar system with eight planets, just like ours. It also unveiled incredible super Earths: planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. It showed us rocky worlds the size of Earth that, like Earth, might harbor life. Kepler discovered 2,681 planets outside our solar system and even more potential candidates. The telescope has now gone silent, its fuel tank empty. Its ability to point at distant stars and identify possible alien worlds worsened dramatically at the beginning of October, but flight controllers still managed to retrieve its latest observations. Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday.Īlready well past its expected lifetime, the 9 1/2-year-old Kepler had been running low on fuel for months. NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary. 'Potentially hazardous asteroid' detected with new algorithmĬAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA relinks with Voyager 2 after fears it would be offline for months ![]() NASA launching a streaming service: 'A new era of pioneers'Īstronaut John Glenn and baseball legend Ted Williams were unlikely BFFs ![]()
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