The Kepler Mission has Come to an End, NASA Announced
The Kepler space telescope has been shut down from his nine years of mission. The telescoped found over 2,600 planets outside of our solar system in his mission but now it run out of fuel.
The Kepler space telescope was released in the sky by NASA back in 2009 and had to do a mission of nearly four years. The spacecraft continued to work past the limit researchers estimated but when it reached four years there was a mechanical problem that stopped it from running temporarily. However, NASA came up with the solution of changing the telescope’s field of view every few months. The telescope was able to send data for five years more, until now.
Back in 2009, the Kepler telescope was the first NASA mission to find planets outside of our solar system, at the size of Earth. It had installed the largest digital camera for space observations with which t was able to collect data about the Milky Way, supernova, the behavior of planets and stars that are orbiting around the planets outside the solar system. It explored an area of 150,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation.
NASA made an announcement in March 2018 about the spacecraft’s fuel which was coming to an end, stopping the mission completely. This year the telescope had stopped from sending data back to Earth but it left behind a lot of new data discovery about thousands of planets found outside of our solar system.
The Kepler mission had an impressive success as Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate himself admits that it was ‘wildly exceeded all our expectations.’ Along with its nine years-long mission, the telescope collected a huge amount of new data that now scientist have to interpret and learn about.
All NASA’s data about these planets are now publicly available in the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.
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