Kepler stops it, what gave us the "most boring mission of NASA"?

In the first place, Kepler did not expect a lot of discoveries. "They just did not know what to expect, and when the space telescope was launched in 2009, we thought we could find a handful of planets," Ellerbroek said. "It ended up reaching a few thousand, which exceeded Borucki's wildest expectations."

"Exoplanets are now one of the major themes of astronomy, and Kepler put it on the map – most of the stars you see at night we also know that or several planets revolve around us, and we know that about half of them look like the Earth, although that does not necessarily mean that life is possible: there are more planets than stars in the world. Milky Way, Kepler's greatest achievement. "

" The worst mission of all time "

The inventor Borucki has already called the work of" his "Kepler" the most boring mission of all the times, doing the same thing every six seconds ". And in a way that was right, says Ellerbroek. "But this constant production of photos was also the strength of the mission, precisely because of the huge amount of data that Kepler provided with a lot of information."

The Kepler cylindrical space telescope measures about 5 meters by 3 and weighs about 1,000 kilograms. . "Not too big, because sending something in space is expensive," says Ellerbroek. "The telescope has four cameras that, together, have always been focused on the same part of the sky, which have always been adjusted, because the telescope was also circling the earth, just taking continuous pictures. . "