Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
NASA’s premier planet-hunting space telescope is out of gas.
The Kepler space telescope can no longer search for planets orbiting other stars, ending the 9½-year mission, officials from the agency announced in a news conference on October 30.
“Because of fuel exhaustion, the Kepler spacecraft has reached the end of its service life,” said Charlie Sobeck, a project system engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “While this is a sad event, we are by no means unhappy with this remarkable machine.”
Kepler’s discoveries have forever changed the way astronomers think about planets in other solar systems. Before the spacecraft launched in 2009, only about 350 exoplanets were known to exist in the galaxy, and nearly all of them were the size of Jupiter or larger.
As of October 30, there are more than 3,800 known exoplanets, and Kepler was responsible for discovering 2,720 of them. The spacecraft found planets in all shapes, sizes and configurations: seven planets orbiting one star, planets orbiting at jaunty angles, planets with two suns, planets more than twice as old as Earth. “These planets formed at the beginning of the formation of our galaxy,” says astronomer William Borucki, who was…
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