Amazing coincidence between NASA's Kepler and Dawn missions |

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Two ships very different from NASA are about to run out of fuel

(NASA) – Two very different NASA ships are about to run out of fuel: the Kepler spacecraft, which spent nine years in the big space collecting data that has detected thousands of planets orbiting our system solar, and the Dawn vessel, which spent 11 years in orbit and studying the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres.

However, both record missions have more in common than their low coincident fuel levels. Both missions gathered innovative data searching for answers both inside and outside our solar system.

Launched in 2007, Dawn is the first spacecraft to orbit a body between Mars and Jupiter and the first to orbit more than one destination in deep space.

From 2011 to 2012, Dawn studied the asteroid Vesta before performing an unprecedented maneuver by leaving his orbit and traveling to Ceres, which he observed for more than 3.5 years.

Dawn will remain in a stable orbit around Ceres for decades. Among his many discoveries, Dawn helped scientists discover the organic matter of Ceres and demonstrate that dwarf planets could have harbored oceans for a significant part of their history – and may still be so.

Kepler, meanwhile, was launched in 2009 and revealed that there was statistically at least one planet around each star in our galaxy. It also opened our eyes to the variety of worlds outside our solar system, with the discovery of more than 2,600 planets orbiting other stars.

Among these worlds are rocky planets the size of the Earth, some of which orbit in the habitable areas of their stars, where liquid water could accumulate on the surface. Kepler also characterized a class of planets that do not exist in our solar system: worlds between the size of Earth and Neptune, or "super-Earths".

Both missions have been extended beyond their originally planned lifetime due to the innovative work of their engineers and scientists.

In 2016, Dawn's mission to Ceres was expanded. In 2017, his mission to Ceres was extended again to study the dwarf planet at altitudes as low as 35 km above the surface of Ceres, with the main objective to understand the evolution of Ceres and its possibly active geology .

In 2012, Kepler completed its main mission and obtained an extension. After the failure of a second gyroscope that helped maintain the stability of the probe in 2013, skilled engineers found a way to use solar pressure to hold the probe temporarily in the desired direction . From 2014, this new mission was named K2. It has been functioning since, bringing together science from 19 different parts of the sky with star populations, galaxies and solar system objects.

Both missions, with their very distinct data sets, have given scientists around the world a lot to think about. According to the Dawn mission, we found that Ceres could still be geologically active and that salt water could mount and deposit salts on the surface.

Thanks to Kepler's mission, we learned that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy and that many of them could be promising for life as we know it. It also showed us the diversity of planets and planetary systems, some of which are very different from ours.

As we prepare to say goodbye to these two record breaking missions, we are delighted that new discoveries will result from their decades of data.

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