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The telescope, which discovered more than 2,600 exoplanets, is fueled.
This is what NASA has just announced at a press conference. The news is not surprising. NASA warned in March of this year that the end was approaching for Kepler. For a long time though, we did not know when the canvas would really fall for the planet hunter. But tonight it's so far away. According to the US Space Agency, the telescope does not have enough fuel to be operational. That's why it was decided to send Kepler back.
Kepler's End
Normally, space missions often end up dramatically, as space organizations do their utmost to destroy their space probes. The probe of the Cassini Room has recently been commissioned to enter Saturn 's atmosphere. They wanted to prevent them from wandering uncontrollably into Saturn's system and crashing into one of Saturn's potentially viable moons. The end of Kepler is not so dramatic: the telescope is far away from Earth and other "sensitive areas", allowing it to retire in its current and safe job.
The planets are ubiquitous
"Kepler has, as the first mission on the planets, exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for the exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond ", said Thomas Zurbuchen, on behalf of NASA. Kepler has discovered a total of 3,826 candidate planets outside our solar system. Subsequent research has shown that more than 2,600 of these planets actually existed. "When we proposed this mission about 35 years ago, we did not know of any planet outside our solar system," said researcher William Borucki. "Now we know that planets are everywhere."
150,000 stars
Kepler was launched in 2009 and was originally expected to look around 150,000 stars for a long time. It was hoped that the telescope would see the brightness of many of these stars decrease briefly. After all, it could indicate that a planet revolves around these stars, which sometimes move between Kepler and the star, while retaining some of the starlight. The approach paid off: after all, Kepler discovered one planet after another. The mission taught us not only that planets are everywhere, but also that there is a great diversity of planets. Kepler discovered rocky planets, but also Jupiters (gas giants very close to their star) and superawards (the type of planet most discovered that we do not know at all in our solar system).
Technical Problems
About four years after the launch of Kepler, the space telescope faced technical problems. Intelligent engineers were able to give the telescope a second life, which allowed Kepler to study more than 500,000 stars.
And now, the canvas has fallen. But that's not a reason to get to work, says Jessie Dotson, attached to the NASA Ames Research Center . "We know that the spacecraft pension is not the end." There are still many hidden discoveries in Kepler's data. In addition, follow-up missions have been deployed to develop Kepler's work. For example, the planet TESS TESS is currently studying 200,000 very bright stars in the vicinity of the Earth, hoping to find our unknown planets so far. With the help of future telescopes, such as James Webb, we can search for traces of extraterrestrial life on these exoplanets discovered by Kepler.
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