![]() ![]() The telescope is expected to spot as many as 1,500 new exoplanets. While TESS will also look for slight dips in a star's brightness as a planet crosses in front of it, it will look at a much broader swath of the sky than Kepler did. As early as April 16, the agency is due to launch its next space telescope, called TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which has been in the works since 2005, years before Kepler even launched. Assuming the spacecraft doesn't die unexpectedly and NASA can control its demise, the last command they send will be simply to shut down the telescope's transmitters.Īnd while there may never be a mission quite like Kepler, NASA has plenty more exoplanets to find. Instead, it will continue floating through space, dancing around the sun in Earth's neighborhood. The Kepler telescope is far enough away from Earth and all the worlds scientists think may hold life that the NASA team isn't worried about how to dispose of the spacecraft safely. The timeline series includes a compilation of artists concepts depicting milestones from the Kepler mission-NASAs first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around sun-like stars. Read more: Kepler mission: Five of the most incredible discoveries from NASA's alien-hunting spacecraft That's almost three-quarters of the grand total of alien planets identified by scientists to date. An international team of astrophysicists using NASA. K2 was originally meant to last for 10 "campaigns" of about three months each it recently began the 17th.īetween the Kepler and K2 phases, the telescope has identified 2,649 confirmed exoplanets. NASAs Kepler space telescope has spotted a Jupiter look-alike in a new discovery, even though the instrument stopped operations four years ago. In 2012, NASA extended its work, and in 2013, after two parts broke, the Kepler spacecraft was reborn as "K2," still looking for exoplanets but wandering across the sky instead of keeping its focus fixed on one field of stars. When Kepler originally launched, its mission was supposed to last just three and a half years, though the team behind the spacecraft wanted to be sure it wouldn't fall apart before six years. ![]()
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