The Kepler mission comes to an end
The Kepler mission comes to an end
Artistic illustration of the Kepler space telescope. Credit: NASA / Wendy Stenzel / Daniel Rutter.
After nine years in space collecting data indicating that the sky is filled with billions of planets, outnumbering the stars, NASA's Kepler space telescope has depleted the fuel needed for scientific operations. Kepler leaves us a legacy of more than 2,600 discovered exoplanets, many of which could be promising places for life.
Kepler has opened our eyes to the diversity of planets that exist in the galaxy. The most recent analysis of the telescope's findings concludes that it is likely that 20-50% of the stars visible in the sky have small, possibly rocky, planets within the habitable zones of their stars.
The most common size of the planets found by Kepler does not exist in the Solar System - worlds larger than Earth and smaller than Neptune - and we have much to learn about these planets. Kepler also discovered that there are very compact planetary systems, in some cases with so many planets orbiting near their stars that our inner Solar System seems small in comparison.
Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler telescope combined state-of-the-art techniques in stellar brightness measurement with the largest digital camera for space observations at launch. Originally positioned to observe 150,000 stars continuously in a region of the sky in the constellation of the swan (Cygnus), Kepler made the first probe of planets in the galaxy and became NASA's first mission to detect planets the size of the planet. Earth in the habitable zones of its stars.
The achievements of the Kepler space telescope in numbers. Credit: NASA / Ames / Wendy Stenzel.
With four years of mission, after fulfilling the objectives of the primary mission, mechanical failures temporarily stopped the observations. The mission team was able to devise an arrangement, changing the field of vision of the ship approximately every three months. This allowed a extended mission for the telescope, nicknamed K2, which lasted as long as the first mission and raised to more than 500,000 the number of stars studied by Kepler.
The observation of so many stars allowed scientists to better understand the behavior and stellar properties, which is critical information to study the planets that orbit them. Investigations of the data collected by Kepler also promote other areas of astronomy, such as the history of the Milky Way and the early stages of supernovae that are used to study how fast the universe expands. Scientists are expected to spend a decade or more studying the data provided by Kepler.
Prior to the ship's withdrawal, the scientists took Kepler to its full potential, successfully completing multiple observation campaigns and sending valuable scientific data, even after the initial warnings of lack of fuel. The latest data, from campaign 19, will complement the data of the new NASA planetary hunter, the TESS mission released in April. Data from both Kepler and TESS will be used for future missions, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, to look for signs of life.
Source: POT
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