![]() It is a possible "water world" the size of Earth perhaps covered with oceans and with a water-based atmosphere. The resurrected mission became known as K2 and yielded 350 confirmed exoplanets.īorucki said his favorite exoplanet spotted by the telescope was Kepler 22B, located more than 600 light years from Earth. "It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away," said Borucki said. But scientists found a way to keep it operational. ![]() The mission was almost over in 2013 when the telescope's positioning system broke down. "Basically, Kepler opened the gate for mankind's exploration of the cosmos," William Borucki, Kepler's now-retired chief investigator, told reporters. Several of them are rocky and Earth-sized in the so-called Goldilocks or habitable zone of a star - an orbit where temperatures are neither too cold nor too hot, but just right for the existence of water, which is considered a key ingredient for life. Kepler found over two-third of the roughly 3,800 exoplanets that have been documented in the past two decades. The $700 million mission led to the discovery of more than 2,600 of the roughly 3,800 exoplanets or planets outside our solar system that have been documented in the past two decades. Kepler's nine-and-a-half year flight was more than twice the original target," Charlie Sobeck, project system engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told reporters on a conference call. "While this may be a sad event, we are by no means unhappy with the performance of this marvelous machine. The spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the sun 94 million miles (156 million kilometers) from Earth, will drift further from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters, the US space agency said. The Kepler space telescope that found thousands of planets beyond our solar system and boosted the search for worlds that might support life has run out of fuel, NASA said. NASA on Tuesday announced the demise of its elite planet-hunting telescope just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary. ![]()
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