NASA has retired the Kepler Space Telescope after nine years

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has finally been decommissioned by the agency.

While Kepler has gone to great lengths of discovery. There's enough in there for a decade of research, NASA says.

During its life the telescope has more than 2,600 planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. Over its life Kepler studied over 500,000 stars.

Among the telescope's discoveries is Kepler-186f, the first Earth-sized planet to be discovered in its star living area.

And it also found Kepler-10b is a planet larger than Earth which orbits 10 times closer to its star than Mercury does to bear. Made out of rock it is tidally locked to 1371 degrees celsius.

The telescope has now been decommissioned fully. NASA sends a message to the radio station.

The final command also turned off the failsafes to prevent the telescope from trying to turn its transmitter back on.

Kepler 's exoplanet hunt will be passed on to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

So what happens to Kepler now? Well, it's orbit is trailing Earth by around 94 million miles. As time goes on the Earth will catch up with it and we will gravitate towards the telescope closer to the Sun and a faster-than-earth orbit.

That process will be repeated in 2117 Kepler will catch the Earth and will gravitate towards a more distant orbit around the sun. And that's going to be possible for the future.

The telescope will never get closer than 1 million miles to the Earth or the distance between the moon and us.