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The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered more than 2,600 planets outside our solar system – its mission is now complete. After nine years in space, the unmanned space observatory was expecting it, the fuel ran out, announced the NASA space agency.
"The time has come," wrote Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA, SMS messaging service. "Thank you for changing our vision of the universe." The telescope will now retreat to its current orbit.
NASA had sent the space telescope named after the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) in space in 2009. His mission was to search for planets outside our solar system called exoplanets .
Thanks to Kepler, scientists could have shown that 20 to 50 percent of all visible stars in the night sky would probably be orbited by Earth-like and theoretically habitable planets, NASA said. Former Kepler Research Director William Borucki described the mission as "a great success".
"Now we know that planets are everywhere"
"When we started thinking about this mission 35 years ago, we did not know any planet outside our solar system," Borucki said. "Now we know that planets are everywhere."
It will take years to evaluate the data provided by Kepler. The Tess search satellite, successor to Kepler, was fired into space in April. Like "Kepler", the telescope observes the light of the stars. If the night darkens, it could mean that a planet has pbaded. "Tess" could find both small rocky planets and huge celestial bodies – and should cover a much larger area than "Kepler".
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