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The legendary NASA Kepler Space Telescope has retired after exhausting itself in the fuel needed for new scientific operations, ending a prolific nine and a half year mission during which it discovered more than 2,600 intriguing exoplanets, some of which could shelter life, the US Space Agency said.
The data collected during Kepler's space missions indicate that our skies are filled with billions of hidden planets, more than the stars, NASA said in a statement.
The unmanned space telescope, launched in 2009, leaves more than 2,600 discoveries of planets outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life, announced the US Space Agency.
"As NASA's first planet-search mission, Kepler 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. , Associate Administrator, NASA Science Mission Directorate.
"Not only did this show us how many planets could be there, but it also gave birth to an entirely new and robust research field that has taken the scientific community by storm," Zurbuchen said.
"His discoveries shed new light on our place in the universe and illuminated the mysteries and enticing possibilities of the stars," he said.
Kepler has opened our eyes to the diversity of planets that exist in our galaxy, mission scientists said.
The most recent analysis of Kepler's findings concludes that 20 to 50% of visible stars in the night sky are likely to have small, possibly rocky, planets of similar size to the Earth and located in the area. habitable of their mother stars.
This means that they are located at distances from their parent stars where liquid water – an essential element of life as we know it – could accumulate on the surface of the planet, said NASA.
The most common size of the planet found, Kepler, does not exist in our solar system – a world between the size of Earth and Neptune – and we have a lot to learn about these planets, according to the US Space Agency.
Kepler also discovered that nature often produced very congested planetary systems, in some cases with as many planets orbiting their parent stars that our own internal solar system seems rarer by comparison.
"When we started designing this mission 35 years ago, we did not know of any planet outside our solar system," said Kepler's founding principal investigator, William Borucki, today. Retired from the NASA Ames Research Center.
"Now that we know that planets are everywhere, Kepler has put us on a new path full of promise for future generations to explore our galaxy," Borucki said.
Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope combined advanced techniques for stellar brightness measurement and the largest digital camera equipped for the observation of outer space of that era.
Initially positioned to continuously watch 150,000 stars in a part of the starry sky of the Swan constellation, Kepler conducted the first survey of the planets of our galaxy and became the agency's first mission to detect planets of the size of Earth in the habitable areas of their planet. stars.
"The Kepler 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 Jet Propulsion Laboratory's NASA, who led the Kepler project during the development of the mission. .
"There were certainly challenges, but Kepler had an extremely talented team of scientists and engineers who defeated them," Livesay said.
Four years after the beginning of the mission, once the main objectives were achieved, mechanical failures temporarily interrupted the observations.
The mission team was able to find a solution by changing the spacecraft's field of vision about every three months.
This allowed to extend the mission of the spacecraft, called K2, which lasted as long as the first mission and which exceeded the number of stars interviewed by Kepler up to more than 500,000.
The observation of so many stars has allowed scientists to better understand stellar behaviors and properties, essential information for the study of the planets that orbit them.
New research on the stars with Kepler's data also deepen other areas of astronomy, such as the history of our Milky Way galaxy and the early exploded stars called supernovae, used to study the speed of development of the universe, said NASA.
The extended mission data was also immediately made available to the public and the scientific community, making discoveries at an incredible pace and setting the bar high for other missions.
Scientists should spend a decade or more searching for new discoveries in the data store provided by Kepler.
"We know that the spacecraft retreat is not the end of Kepler's discoveries," said Jessie Dotson, Kepler's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Before removing the Space Shuttle, scientists pushed Kepler to its full potential, completing several observation campaigns and downloading valuable scientific data, even after the first fuel warnings.
The latest data, from campaign 19, will complement NASA's latest planetary hunter, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in April.
TESS builds on Kepler's foundation with new data sets to search for planets gravitating around 200,000 of the world's brightest and closest stars, worlds that can be explored by missions such as the Space Telescope James Webb from NASA.
(This story has not been changed by Business Standard staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
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