NASA's planet-hunter Kepler retires, the new quest begins

New Delhi : After nine and a half years of non-stop work, the planet hunting space telescope, Kepler bids good bye. The telescope has run out of manoeuvring fuel and is being retired, NASA announced. 

During the stay in orbit, Kepler has discovered 530,506 stars observed and 2,662 planets. The little spacecraft will now remain forever around the Sun and astronomers mourn the loss of it. However, the Kepler mission was a successful one and the space agency celebrated the moment of success.

NASA's Kepler has given new definition to the astronomical science and has enlarged the universe and its possibilities.

“Kepler has truly opened a new vista in astronomy,” said William Borucki, a physicist at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, who led the Kepler mission until his retirement in 2015.

“We have shown there are more planets than stars in our galaxies.”

Many planets discovered by Kepler might be just warm enough that they could have liquid water on their surface, “a situation conducive to the existence of life”.

Meanwhile, Nasa’s new space observatory, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess, has already been lifted off to search for planets in the nearby cosmos, and giant telescopes both on the ground and in space are being designed to detect and observe exoplanets. 

“The search for planets is the search for life,” said Natalie Batalha, a longtime Kepler mission scientist now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a conference in 2017. “These results will form the basis for future searches for life.”