An illustration of the Kepler Space Telescope, which is on its very last legs. As of October 2018, the planet-hunting spacecraft has been in space for nearly a decade. (NASA via AP)
The Kepler Space Telescope is dead. Long live the Kepler.
NASA officials announced on Tuesday that the pioneering exoplanet survey telescope — which had led to the identification of almost 2,700 exoplanets — had finally reached its end, having essentially run out of fuel. This is after nine years of observing, after a malfunctioning steering system required a complex fix and change of plants, and after the hydrazine fuel levels reached empty.
While the sheer number of exoplanets discovered is impressive the telescope did substantially more: it proved once and for all that the galaxy is filled with planets orbiting distant stars. Before Kepler this was speculated, but now it is firmly established thanks to the Kepler run.
It also provided data for thousands of papers exploring the logic and characteristics of exoplanets. And that’s why the Kepler will indeed live long in the world of space science.
“As NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
“Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm. Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars.”
The Kepler Space Telescope was focused on hunting for planets in this patch of the Milky Way. After two of its four spinning reaction wheels failed, it could no longer remain steady enough to stare that those distant stars but was reconfigured to look elsewhere and at a different angle for the K2 mission. (Carter Roberts/NASA)
Kepler was initially the unlikely brainchild of William Borucki, its founding principal investigator who is now retired from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
When he began thinking of designing and proposing a space telescope that could potentially tell us how common distant exoplanets were — and especially smaller terrestrial exoplanets like Earth – the science of extra solar planets was at a very different stage.… Read more
