NASA's Kepler spacecraft dead after discovering thousands of planets
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Source: CBS News
NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which discovered more than 2,680 exoplanets orbiting distant stars and allowed scientists to statistically show billions more must exist across the Milky Way, has finally run out of fuel, bringing one of NASA's most scientifically productive projects to an end after an extended nine-and-a-half year mission, mission managers said Tuesday.
"The Kepler mission has been an enormous success," said Bill Borucki, the original Kepler principal investigator and leader of the team that convinced NASA to build and launch the $692 million mission in 2009.
"We have shown 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 that there could be liquid water on the surface, a situation conducive to the existence of life," Borucki said.
Kepler also found planets "completely unlike those in our solar system," he told reporters. "Some of those, in fact, might be actual water worlds. We've also found planets that were formed at the beginning of the formation of our galaxy six-and-a-half billion years before the formation of our own star and before the formation of the Earth. Imagine what life might be like on such planets."
Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasas-kepler-spacecraft-dead-after-discovering-thousands-of-planets-2018-10-30/
There's much much more information in the linked article. If your any kind of science junkie it's worth reading the entire article, very interesting stuff.
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Tears in my eye for this wonderful epic space mission.
