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NASA's elite planet's fighter spacecraft has been declared dead, just months before its 10th anniversary.
Officials announced Tuesday the disappearance of the Kepler Space Telescope.
WATCH: from 2015 – NASA discovers a new "world" among the stars
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 has paved the way for the exploration of the cosmos by humanity," said William Borucki, a retired NASA scientist who headed Kepler's first science team.
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.
READ MORE: Astronomers claim to have discovered the first moon outside our solar system
NASA's director of astrophysics, Paul Hertz, estimated that two to a dozen planets discovered by Kepler are rocky and earth-sized in the so-called Goldilocks area. But Kepler's global census of the planet showed that 20 to 50 percent of stars in the night sky could have planets like ours in the living zone for life, he said.
The $ 700 million mission even discovered last year an eight-planet solar system, just like ours.
"It has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos," said Hertz.
"We now know, thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope and its scientific mission, 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 detect a chip that crawled on a car's headlight when it was 100 miles away," Borucki said.
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.
This illustration shows NASA's exoplanet hunter, the Kepler Space Telescope.
NASA / Wendy Stenzel / Daniel Rutter
In total, nearly 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed over the last two decades, of which two-thirds thanks to Kepler.
Kepler focused on the stars thousands of light-years away and, according to NASA, showed that there was at least one planet statistically around each star of our Milky Way.
Borucki, who envisioned the mission several decades ago, said one of his favorite discoveries was Kepler 22b, an aquatic planet larger than Earth but where it is neither too hot nor too cold – the type "that could lead to life"
Kepler's successor launched in April, the NASA spacecraft Tess, is targeting stars closer to home. He has already identified some possible planets.
READ MORE: The Kepler Space Telescope discovers two rocky planets that could support life
Project scientist Tess, Padi Boyd, called Kepler's mission "a resounding 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 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 experienced temporary 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".
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