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By Joey Roulette
ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) – The Kepler Space Telescope is running out of fuel and will be taken out of service after a nine-and-a-half-year mission that has detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system is looking for worlds that could harbor extraterrestrial life, NASA said Tuesday.
Currently orbiting the sun at 156 million km from the Earth, the satellite will move away from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters, announced the US Space Agency.
The telescope exposes the diversity of planets that reside in our galaxy The Milky Way. Discoveries indicate that distant star systems are populated with billions of planets and even locate the first known moon outside our solar system.
The Kepler telescope discovered more than 2,600 of the approximately 3,800 exoplanets – the term for planets outside our solar system – that have been documented over the past two decades.
Its positioning system broke down in 2013 about four years after its launch, although scientists found a way to keep it operational. But the telescope is now running out of fuel for future operations, which has resulted in its withdrawal.
"Although this may be a sad event, we are not at all dissatisfied with the performance of this wonderful machine – Kepler's nine-and-a-half-year flight was more than twice the original goal," Charlie Sobeck, an engineering project system at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told reporters during a conference call.
Kepler was replaced by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TES), launched in April. TESS is participating in a $ 337 million mission over two years.
On March 6, 2009, NASA launched the Kepler telescope to determine if Earth-like planets that may contain life are common or rare in other star systems. During its mission, Kepler detected 2,681 confirmed planets and 2,899 candidates, bringing the total to 5,580. This number includes about 50 that can be about the same size and temperature as the Earth.
"By and large, Kepler has paved the way for the exploration of the cosmos by humanity," said William Borucki, Kepler's chief investigator, today retired.
Borucki described his favorite exoplanet, located more than 600 light-years from Earth and spotted for the first time by the telescope in 2009, named Kepler 22B. It is a possible "water world" of the size of the Earth perhaps covered by oceans and a water-based atmosphere. Water is considered a key ingredient of life.
Kepler's data also provides a new way to badess whether a planet has a solid surface, such as Earth and Mars, or is gaseous, like Jupiter and Saturn. The distinction helped scientists to target potential terrestrial planets and improve the chances of finding life.
Kepler used a detection method called transit photometry, which looked for periodic and repetitive immersions in the visible light of stars, caused by pbading or transiting planets.
(Report by Joey Roulette in Orlando, Florida, written by Ben Klayman in Detroit, edited by Will Dunham)
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