![]() Kepler has also seen some cool things closer to home. A Uranus-sized planet with a 704-day orbit. (Our solar system is just 4.6 billion years old the Milky Way is about 13.6 billion years old.) Two planets that come within 1.9 million kilometers of each other-just five times the distance between Earth and the Moon. An ancient, 11.2-billion-year-old system named Kepler-444. The first real-life Tatooine, where a planet orbits two stars. A tightly-packed solar system with five planets closer to their star than Mercury. An Earth-size planet in a Sun-like star's habitable zone. The potential "water world” of Kepler-22b. If you can imagine a type of planetary system, Kepler has probably found it. ![]() Now, there are around 3,800, and Kepler data have contributed to almost 2,700 of those discoveries-about 70 percent. Through 2008, the year before Kepler’s launch, scientists had confirmed the existences of 340 exoplanets, according to data from the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia. To say Kepler revolutionized the field of exoplanet science is an understatement. This orbital dance could theoretically last for millions of years. Every 40 years or so, Earth and Kepler will cross paths like two ships passing quietly in the night, with Kepler never coming closer than the distance between Earth and the Moon. NASA has decided to retire the spacecraft by shutting down its radio transmitters, leaving it to drift slowly through space, falling farther and farther behind Earth’s elliptical track around the Sun. ![]() Without adequate fuel reserves, the spacecraft cannot turn towards Earth to send home the precious pictures it takes while staring at the sky in search of planets crossing in front of stars. Launched in 2009 on a 3.5-year mission to get a statistical sense of the number of exoplanets in the Milky Way, the telescope has operated for 9 years, thanks to austere fuel use by its mission team. But on 23 October, NASA learned that the spacecraft had fallen asleep, a side effect of the fact that it was out of fuel. The one-way light travel time between Kepler and Earth is 9.3 minutes.Īfter that, Kepler tried to get back to work. There, Kepler turned toward Earth and transmitted the precious data it recently gathered while staring at a patch of sky in the constellation Aquarius. On 11 October, NASA’s Deep Space Network turned its gaze to a spot 170 million kilometers behind Earth in our path around the Sun. NASA’s groundbreaking Kepler space telescope mission, which revolutionized our understanding of planets orbiting other stars, has come to an end, the agency announced today.
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