NASA has decided to retire the spacecraft within its current, safe orbit, away from Earth. The mission began new types of research as well, such as the study of objects within our solar system, exploded stars, and distant supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies.Īfter nine years in deep space collecting data that indicate our sky to be filled with billions of hidden planets - more planets even than stars - NASA's Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel needed for further science operations. K2 still hunted for planets, but it scanned a larger swath of sky than before, along the ecliptic plane. In 2013, Kepler was assigned a new mission called "K2." Two of the spacecraft's reaction wheels had failed, so engineers came up with a clever scheme to redesign the mission. A handful of planets are thought to be rocky like Earth (but a bit bigger), and orbit in the habitable zone of their stars, where liquid water - an essential ingredient of life as we know it - might exist. Using data from the Kepler mission and the extended K2 mission, scientists have identified more than 2,800 candidate exoplanets and have confirmed more than 2,600 of these as bona fide planets. Kepler was a space telescope designed to survey a portion of the Milky Way galaxy in search of exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.
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