TESS is on a two-year, $337 million mission. Kepler was succeeded by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which was launched in April. 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. Quote "While this may be a sad event, we are by no means unhappy with the performance of this marvelous machine. But the telescope has now run out of the fuel needed for further operations, leading to its retirement. Its positioning system broke down in 2013 about four years after its launch, though scientists found a way to keep it operational. The Kepler telescope discovered more than 2,600 of the roughly 3,800 exoplanets - the term for planets outside our solar system - that have been documented in the past two decades. The telescope laid bare the diversity of planets that reside in our Milky Way galaxy, with findings indicating that distant star systems are populated with billions of planets, and even helped pinpoint the first moon known outside our solar system. Currently orbiting the sun 94 million miles (156 million km) from Earth, the spacecraft will drift further from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters, the US space agency said. Quote The Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and will be retired after a 9-1/2-year mission in which it detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system and boosted the search for worlds that might harbor alien life, NASA said on Tuesday.
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