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The Kepler Space Telescope runs out of fuel and will be withdrawn from service after a 9 ½-year mission in which it has detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system and strengthened the search for enabling worlds to an extraterrestrial life, NASA
Currently orbiting the sun at 156 million km from the Earth, the spacecraft will move away from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters, announced today. 39, US space agency.
The telescope exposes the diversity of planets that reside in our galaxy, as well as discoveries that distant star systems are populated with billions of planets, and even locate the first known moon outside our system solar.
Kepler's telescope discovered more than 2,600 of the approximately 3,800 exoplanets – the term for planets outside our solar system – have been documented over the past two decades.
His positioning system broke down in 2013, about four years after his Unch, although scientists found a way to keep it operational. But the telescope is now running out of fuel for future operations, resulting in its abandonment.
"Although this may be a sad event, we are not unhappy with the performance of this wonderful machine," said Kepler Charlie Sobeck, project engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. to reporters during a conference call.
Kepler was replaced by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite satellite, or TESS, which was launched in April .TESS participates in a $ 337 million mission over two years
On March 6, 2009, NASA launched the Kepler telescope to determine if Earth-like and life-hosting planets were common or rare in other star systems. Kepler has detected 2,681 confirmed planets and 2,899 candidates, bringing the total to 5,580. This number includes about 50 that may be about the same size and temperature as the Earth. e.
"Basically, Kepler opened the door to the exploration of the cosmos by humanity," told reporters William Borucki, Kepler's retired chief investigator, [19659002] Borucki described his favorite exoplanet, located more than 600 light-years from Earth and first spotted 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 an essential ingredient in life.
Kepler's data also provides a new way of badessing whether a planet has a solid surface, such as Earth and Mars, or is gaseous, like Jupiter and Saturn. The distinction has helped scientists target Earth-like potential planets and improve the chances of finding life.
Kepler used a detection method called transit photometry, which searched for periodic and repetitive troughs in the visible light of stars caused by the pbadage of planets. or in transit in front of them.
© Thomson Reuters 2018
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