NASA Retires Kepler Space Telescope

After NASA's Kepler space telescope has more than enough space in the world. NASA has decided to remove the spacecraft from its current, safe orbit, away from Earth. Kepler leaves a legacy of more than 2,600 planet discoveries from outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life.

"As NASA's first planet-hunting mission," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Associate Administrator of Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm. the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars. "

Kepler has opened our eyes to the diversity of planets that exist in our galaxy. The most recent analysis of Kepler's discoveries concludes that 20 to 50 percent of the stars are likely to have small, possibly rocky, planets similar in size to Earth, and located within the living area of ​​their parent stars. That means they're located at distances from their parent stars where liquid water-a vital ingredient to life we ​​know it-might pool on the planet surface.

The most common size of planet Earth and Neptune. Kepler also found nature often produces jam-packed planetary systems, in some cases with so many planets orbiting their own inner world.

"When we started designing this mission 35 years ago," said the Kepler mission's founding principal investigator, William Borucki, now retired from NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "Now that we know planets are everywhere, Kepler has set us on a new path that's full of promise for future generations to explore our galaxy."

Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler space telescope combined cutting-edge techniques in measurement stellar with the largest digital camera outfitted for outer space observations at that time. Originally Posted in 150,000 stars in one star-studded patch of the sky in the constellation Cygnus, Kepler took the first survey of planets in our galaxy and became the agency's first mission to detect Earth-sized planets in the livable areas of their stars.

"The Kepler's mission was based on a very innovative design," said Leslie Livesay, director for astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who served as Kepler project manager during mission development . "There were definitely challenges, but Kepler had an extremely talented team of scientists and engineers who overcame them."

Four years into the mission, after the primary mission had been met, mechanical failures only halted observations. The mission team was able to motto a fix, switching the spacecraft's field of view roughly every three months. This is an extended mission for the spacecraft, dubbed K2, which has lasted as long as the first mission and bumped Kepler's count of surveyed stars up to more than 500,000.

The observation of so many stars has allowed scientists to understand the stellar behaviors and properties, which is critical to the planets that orbit them. New research is in progress with the adventures of astronomical science, and the emergence of new technologies is expanding. The data from the extended mission were also made available to the public and the community immediately, allowing discovery to be made at an incredible pace and setting a high bar for other missions. Scientists are expected to spend a decade or more in search of new discoveries in the treasure of data Kepler provided.

"We know the spacecraft's retirement is not the end of Kepler's discoveries," said Jessie Dotson, Kepler's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "I'm excited about the various discoveries that will be made to date and how future missions will be built upon Kepler's results."

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