The NASA Kepler Space Telescope will detect thousands of planets outside the solar system and showed that there are more planets in our Milky Way galaxy than stars.
On November 15, the NASA Kepler Space Telescope received the latest set of commands to disable communications with the Earth. The “good night” signals complete the process of retiring the spacecraft, which began on October 30th. Kepler ran out of fuel, so there is no longer a chance for scientific research.
Interestingly, Kepler’s farewell fell on the same day as the 388th anniversary of the death of the German astronomer Johann Kepler, who discovered the laws of the planetary motion and died on November 15, 1630. The latter teams were sent from the LASP Operations Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Kepler’s team has disabled security modes that can accidentally turn on systems and disable communications. The spacecraft rotates slowly, so the team had to carefully send signals so that they arrive during the periods of the apparatus’s operation. Engineers will track the telescope to make sure that the commands are executed correctly.
Now Kepler is drifting in a safe orbit around the Sun, sitting at a distance of 94 million miles from the Earth. The telescope data collected over more than 9 years of work will allow you to make many more amazing discoveries.
