NASA leaves the Kepler Space Telescope

After nine
years in the deep space collecting data that indicate that our sky must be filled with
Billions of hidden planets – more planets than stars – NASA's Kepler space
The telescope is running out of fuel for future scientific operations. NASA has
decided to remove the spacecraft in its current safety orbit, far from
Earth. Kepler leaves a legacy of more than 2600 discoveries of planets from
outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life.

"Like NASA
first mission to search for planets, Kepler has far exceeded all our expectations
and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system
and beyond, "said Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy administrator of NASA
Directorate of Scientific Missions in Washington. "Not only did it show us how
a lot of planets could be there, it triggered an entirely new and robust field
research that has taken the scientific community by storm. His discoveries
shed a new light on our place in the universe and illuminated the temptation
mysteries and possibilities among the stars. "

Kepler has
has opened our eyes to the diversity of planets that exist in our galaxy. most
recent analysis of Kepler's findings concludes that 20 to 50 percent of
visible stars in the night sky are likely to have small, possibly rocky,
planets similar in size to Earth and located in the habitable zone of
their parent stars. This means that they are located at distances from their parent
stars where liquid water – an essential ingredient in life as we know it – could
pool on the surface of the planet.

The most common
The size of the planet found Kepler does not exist in our solar system – a world between
the size of the Earth and Neptune – and we have a lot to learn about these planets.
Kepler also discovered that nature often produces highly charged planetary systems
case with as many planets orbiting their mothers stars as our own
The internal solar system seems sparse in comparison.

"When
we started designing this mission 35 years ago, we did not know a single
planet outside our solar system, "said the Kepler mission foundation
The lead investigator, William Borucki, has retired from NASA's Ames Research Center.
Center in Silicon Valley California. "Now that we know that the planets are
everywhere, Kepler has put us on a new path full of promise for the future
generations to explore our galaxy ".

Launched on
March 6, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope combined state-of-the-art techniques in
stellar brightness measurement with the largest digital camera equipped for outdoor
spatial observations at this time. Initially positioned to constantly watch at
150,000 stars in a part of the starry sky of the constellation Cygnus,
Kepler took the first investigation of the planets of our galaxy and became the agency of
first mission to detect planets the size of the Earth in the habitable zones of their planet.
stars.

"The
Kepler's mission was based on a very innovative design. It was an extremely
smart approach to doing this kind of science, "said Leslie Livesay,
director of astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which
Served as Kepler Project Manager during the development of the mission. "There was
certainly challenges, but Kepler had an extremely talented team of scientists
and engineers who defeated them. "

Four years in
mission, once the main objectives of the mission have been achieved,
failures temporarily stopped observations. The mission team was able to design a
repair, changing the spacecraft's field of vision about every three months. This
allowed an extended mission for the spacecraft, dubbed K2, which lasted as long
as the first mission and beat the number of Kepler surveyed stars up to more
than 500,000.

L & # 39; observation
so many stars allowed scientists to better understand
behaviors and stellar properties, which are critical information in
to study the planets that orbit them. New search on the stars with Kepler
The data also delve deeper into other areas of astronomy, such as the history of
our galaxy of the Milky Way and the exploded star beginnings called
supernovae that are used to study how fast the universe is expanding. The data
of the expanded mission have also been made available to the public and to the
community immediately, allowing you to make discoveries at an incredible pace
and set the bar high for other missions. Scientists should spend a
decade or more in search of new discoveries in the data treasure
Kepler provided.

"We know
the spacecraft's retreat is not the end of Kepler's discoveries, "said
Jessie Dotson, Kepler Project Scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in
California Silicon Valley. "I am excited about the various discoveries
that still have to come from our data and how future missions will rely on
Kepler's results. "

Before retiring
the probe, the scientists pushed Kepler to its full potential, successfully
complete several observation campaigns and download valuable scientific data
even after the first warnings of low fuel consumption. The latest data from Campaign 19,
will complete the data of the last NASA planetary hunter, the Transiting
Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in April. TESS builds on Kepler
foundation with new batches of data looking for planets orbiting around
200,000 of the brightest stars and the closest to the Earth, worlds that can later
to be explored for signs of life by missions such as NASA's James Webb Space
Telescope.

NASA Ames Research Center Manages Kepler and K2 Missions for NASA
Direction of the scientific mission. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena,
California, led the development of the Kepler mission. Ball Aerospace &
Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado, operates the flight system with
support of the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics of the University
from Colorado to Boulder.

For the Kepler
press kit, including multimedia, chronology and the best scientific results, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/kepler/presskit