Kepler's telescope is dead after finding thousands of worlds

CAP CAN CANVERAL, Florida – NASA's elite planet's fighter jet was declared dead just months before its 10th anniversary.

Officials announced Tuesday the end of the Kepler Space Telescope.

Already well beyond its expected life, the 9-year-old Kepler had run out of fuel for months. Its ability to point distant stars and identify potential extraterrestrial worlds has deteriorated dramatically in early October, but the flight controllers still managed to retrieve its latest sightings. The telescope has now become silent, its fuel tank is empty.

Kepler discovered 2,681 planets outside our solar system and even more potential candidates. It showed rocky worlds the size of the Earth that, like Earth, could shelter life. He also unveiled incredible super-lands: planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

This even made it possible to discover last year a solar system with eight planets, just like ours.

"This has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos," said Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics at NASA. "Now, thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope and its scientific mission, we know that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy."

Almost lost in 2013 due to a power outage, Kepler was recovered by engineers and ceased to scrutinize the cosmos, covered with thick stars and galaxies, still in the air. the lookout for light spillovers that could indicate a planet in orbit.

"It was like trying to spot a chip that was crawling on a car's headlight when it was 100 miles away," said William Boruki, NASA's retired scientist, who led the first science team. of Kepler.

The resurrected mission is known as K2 and produced 350 confirmed exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, in addition to what the telescope had already discovered since its launch on March 7, 2009 in Cape Canaveral.

In total, nearly 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed over the last two decades, of which two-thirds thanks to Kepler.

Kepler has focused on the stars thousands of light-years away and, according to NASA, has shown that there is statistically at least one planet around each star of our Milky Way.

Kepler's successor launched in April, the NASA spacecraft Tess, is targeting stars closer to home. He has already identified some possible planets.

Project scientist Tess, Padi Boyd, called Kepler's mission "incredible success".

Kepler showed us that "we live in a galaxy full of planets, and we are ready to take the next step to explore these planets," she said.

Another long-time spaceship chasing strange worlds in our own solar system is also on the brink of death.

NASA's 11-year-old Dawn spacecraft is running out of fuel after orbiting the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. It remains in orbit around Ceres, which, like Vesta, is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Two of NASA's oldest telescopes have recently been affected by equipment problems, but they have recovered. The Hubble Space Telescope, 28, has resumed its scientific observations last weekend after a three-week shutdown. The 19-year-old Chandra X-ray telescope pointing system also encountered some problems in October. Both cases involved critical gyroscopes needed to point the telescopes.

Hertz said that all the spaceship problems were "completely independent" and coincide in timing.

Now, at 94 million kilometers from Earth, Kepler should remain in a safe and stable orbit around the sun. The flight controllers will deactivate the transmitters of the spacecraft before offering a last "good night".

— The Health and Science Department of the Associated Press receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Scientific Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.