{"id":13538,"date":"2018-10-30T18:03:52","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T10:03:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasas-trailblazing-kepler-telescope-ends-planet-hunt\/"},"modified":"2018-10-30T18:03:52","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T10:03:52","slug":"nasas-trailblazing-kepler-telescope-ends-planet-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasas-trailblazing-kepler-telescope-ends-planet-hunt\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s trailblazing Kepler telescope ends planet hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This illustration depicts NASA\u2019s exoplanet hunter, the Kepler space telescope. Credits: NASA\/Wendy Stenzel\/Daniel Rutter<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s Kepler telescope has run out of fuel and ended science operations, closing out a pioneering decade-long mission that showed planets are commonplace across our galaxy, agency officials said Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The observatory\u2019s supply of hydrazine has run low for months, but controllers noticed a dramatic drop in fuel pressure earlier this month, indicating Kepler no longer has enough propellant to maintain the precise pointing required to search for planets around other stars, or exoplanets.<\/p>\n

Kepler\u2019s observations since its launch in March 2009 have led astronomers to confirm the existence of 2,681 planets orbiting other stars, with another 2,899 planet candidates in the pipeline that could be confirmed with follow-up observations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2009, the Kepler mission launched, and immediately our team began detecting a wide variety of planets,\u201d said Bill Borucki, a retired astronomer who led Kepler\u2019s science team through development and its early years of science observations. \u201cIn its nine-and-a-half years of operation, the Kepler mission has been an enormous success.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve shown that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy, that many of these planets are roughly the size of the Earth, and some, like the Earth, are at the right distance from their star so there could be liquid water on their surface, a situation conducive to the existence of life,\u201d Borucki said.<\/p>\n

Astronomers discovered a variety of planet types with Kepler, ranging from so-called \u201chot Jupiters\u201d to \u201csuper Earths,\u201d and a handful of rocky planets believed to reside at the right distance from their parent star to maintain liquid water.<\/p>\n

\u201cHot Jupiters\u201d are gas giants that orbit hellishly close to their stars, often completing one lap in a matter of days with surface temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius).<\/p>\n

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NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope at the Astrotech spacecraft processing facility in Florida before its launch on a Delta 2 rocket in 2009. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kepler also found numerous planets between the size of Earth and Neptune. Such planets that orbit the right distance from their star could be water-rich and habitable, astronomers say.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve also discovered planets completely unlike those in our solar system,\u201d Borucki said Tuesday. \u201cSome of those, in fact, might be worlds of water \u2014 actual water worlds. We\u2019ve also found planets that were formed at the beginning of our galaxy, six-and-a-half billion years before the formation of our own star and the before the formation of the Earth. Imagine what life might be like on such planets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists said Kepler\u2019s observations yielded the discovery of between 2 and 12 near-Earth size planets in the habitable zone of their stars, according to NASA.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of Kepler, we know that planets are an incredibly diverse set of objects, much more diverse than we observe in our own solar system,\u201d said Paul Hertz, director of NASA\u2019s astrophysics division. \u201cAnd because of Kepler, we know that solar systems come in a variety of configurations unlike our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Borucki summed it up: \u201cIn a sense, our planetary system is quite atypical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kepler was NASA\u2019s first space mission dedicated to the search for planets around other stars.<\/p>\n

Borucki, who retired from NASA in 2015 after 53-year career, started working on a planet-hunting telescope mission in 1983, nine years before astronomers even confirmed the discovery of the first exoplanet with ground-based observatories. His concept focused on using an ultra-sensitive instrument \u2014 using an array of light-detecting sensors called photometers coupled with a telescope \u2014 to monitor the brightness of stars and register faint dips in light when planets pass in front of their stars.<\/p>\n

The technique is called the \u201ctransit method\u201d for finding exoplanets, and it tells scientists about the size of each world, which can lead astronomers to infer whether the planet is a gaseous object or a rocky one.<\/p>\n

Based at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in California, Borucki and his team worked on the photometer technology in labs and on ground-based telescopes until NASA selected his Kepler proposal for full development in 2001.<\/p>\n

Speaking with reporters Tuesday, Borucki likened Kepler\u2019s technological achievement to \u201ctrying to detect a fly crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away. And the instrument must do it for 150,000 stars simultaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n

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President Barack Obama congratulates William Borucki on receiving the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, or Sammie, in the East Room of the White House. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Built by Ball Aerospace, the Kepler spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral on March 6, 2009, aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket. The launcher deployed Kepler into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, and the spacecraft has distanced itself from its home planet over its nearly decade-long mission, now located around 94 million miles (151 million kilometers) from Earth, according to Charlie Sobeck, Kepler\u2019s project system engineer at Ames.<\/p>\n

During Kepler\u2019s four-year primary mission \u2014 from the observatory\u2019s launch in March 2009 until early 2013 \u2014 the craft aimed its telescope at the same field of more than 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.<\/p>\n

The 2013 failure of a second of four reaction wheels used to keep Kepler\u2019s 3.1-foot (95-centimeter) telescope pointed prompted engineers to re-plan the mission. An extended observations campaign dubbed K2 began in 2014, using a combination of the two remaining reaction wheels, hydrazine fuel and solar pressure to maintain the telescope\u2019s aim at a new star field every few months.<\/p>\n

Kepler launched with 12 kilograms, or a little over 3 gallons, of hydrazine fuel feeding rocket thrusters to occasionally unload momentum from the observatory\u2019s spinning gyro-like reaction wheels and offset solar pressure that could influence the spacecraft\u2019s orientation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew when we launched that the spacecraft would ultimately be limited by its fuel load,\u201d Sobeck said.<\/p>\n

Sobeck said Kepler operated more than twice its original design life, and ground controllers first noticed signs of Kepler\u2019s waning fuel supply in June as telemetry measurements showed pressures dropping in the spacecraft\u2019s propulsion system.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of fuel exhaustion, the Kepler spacecraft has reached the end of its service life,\u201d Sobeck said. \u201cWhile this may be a sad event, we are by no means unhappy with the performance of this marvelous machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sobeck said controllers will send the final command to Kepler in the coming weeks, ordering the spacecraft to disable its on-board fault protection software and turn off its transmitters.<\/p>\n

Kepler collected its last science observations in September, ending a run that observed more than 530,000 stars and returned 678 gigabytes of data. Kepler\u2019s discoveries also helped astronomers write nearly 3,000 scientific papers, a number that will continue to climb.<\/p>\n

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Artist\u2019s concept of Kepler-16b, first planet around a double-star system
Credits: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/T. Pyle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe found small potentially rocky planets around some of these bright stars, and those are now prime targets of current and future telescopes so we can move on to see what these planets are made of, how they are formed, and what their atmospheres be like,\u201d said Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at Ames.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile we have ceased spacecraft operations, the science results from the Kepler data will continue for years to come,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A NASA spokesperson said the Kepler mission cost $692 million, including its development, launch and operations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always felt like it was the little spacecraft that could,\u201d Dotson said. \u201cIt always did what we asked of it, and sometimes more, and that\u2019s a great thing to have from a spacecraft.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis marks the formal end of data collection, but not the end of data analysis thanks to NASA\u2019s public archives,\u201d tweeted Natalie Batalha, an astrophysicist and former Kepler project scientist. \u201cI\u2019m not sad.  <\/span>We did everything we wanted and more. Onward!\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launched in April to extend Kepler\u2019s search across nearly the entire sky over a two-year prime mission. TESS will use the same \u201ctransit\u201d search method as Kepler, but will focus on bright, nearby stars.<\/p>\n

\u201cNASA is handing off the mantle of planet-hunter from the Kepler space telescope to TESS \u2014 the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite \u2014 which is already in orbit and is discovering new exoplanets even as we speak,\u201d Hertz said.<\/p>\n

The long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope, now set for launch in 2021, will have the power to probe many of the planets discovered by Kepler and TESS and study the make-up of their atmospheres.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe planets that TESS can find, we are hoping to put the next layer of information on those and determine what those planets are like as places,\u201d said Padi Boyd, TESS project scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to measure the size of a planet \u2014 comparatively easy \u2014 but it\u2019s much, much harder to be able to tell if that planet has an atmosphere, which is so important to life here on Earth. And if it does have an atmosphere, what does it contain? Does it contain water, which we believe is an essential building block for life?\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This illustration depicts NASA\u2019s exoplanet hunter, the Kepler space telescope. Credits: NASA\/Wendy Stenzel\/Daniel Rutter NASA\u2019s Kepler telescope has run out of fuel and ended science operations, closing out a pioneering decade-long mission that showed planets are commonplace across our galaxy, agency officials said Tuesday. The observatory\u2019s supply of hydrazine has run low for months, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1905,1690,1665,1913,559,2826,190],"class_list":["post-13538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-ames-research-center","tag-astrophysics","tag-ball-aerospace","tag-discovery-program","tag-exoplanets","tag-kepler","tag-nasa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13538"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}