NASA transmits Kepler's planetary telescope to retirement

The Kepler fuel from the probe has been exhausted and will be out of service after a nine-and-a-half-year mission that tracked thousands of planets out of our solar system and helped search for worlds that could be inhabited by creatures of the planet. 39, space, announced the US space agency. .

Kepler, orbiting the sun about 156 million kilometers from Earth, will be farther away from the planet when mission engineers turn off wireless transmitters, NASA said Tuesday.

The telescope revealed the diversity of planets in the Milky Way galaxy by discovering that distant star systems encompass billions of planets and also detect the first known moon outside the solar system.

The Kepler telescope has detected more than 2,600 of the 3,800 planets outside the solar system documented over the last 20 years.

The telescope was disrupted in 2013, almost four years after its launch, but scientists have found ways to keep operating. But the fuel needed by the telescope to perform other operations is exhausted, leaving it out of service.

"It may be sad, but we are very pleased with the performance of this wonderful machine," said Charlie Sobek, a systems engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Kepler's nine-and-a-half-year trip was more than double the target. "

The satellite probe of planets outside the solar system, called Tiss, was launched in April at Kepler. The TICE mission lasts two years and costs $ 337 million.

NASA launched the Kepler telescope on March 6, 2009 to determine if Earth-like and likely-living planets are common in other star systems. During his mission, Kepler monitored 2,681 constellations and 2,899 objects, which could represent a total of 5,580 planets. The figure includes about 50 planets that may be about the same size and temperature as the Earth.

"Kepler has paved the way for human exploration of the universe," said William Buruki, head of Kepler's research team, who has retired.