Tag: Kepler

18 NOV

NASA bids Kepler ‘goodnight’ with last set of commands

The Kepler Space Telescope has officially gone to sleep for good. On November 15th, the death anniversary of its namesake German astronomer Johannes Kepler, its ground team sent it a series of “goodnight” commands. They were meant to disable the telescope’s safety modes that could switch it back on and to shut down its transmitters […]

30 OCT

The Kepler space telescope’s end has finally come

The time has finally come to say goodbye to Kepler, the spacecraft that exceeded expectations throughout its mission and has so far confirmed more than 2,600 planets outside of our solar system. In March, NASA warned that Kepler’s end might be nearing as it was running very low on fuel, and scientists running the spacecraft […]

01 APR

Kepler caught strange supernova: Sudden surge, rapid decay

Enlarge / Kepler was made to find planets, but it’s found other uses. (credit: Kepler) The Kepler planet-hunting telescope was designed to do one thing: gather data from a single portion of the sky often enough to catch rare, brief events. The events it was looking for were slight dips in light that happened as […]

19 MAR

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope is running out of fuel

NASA’S Kepler telescope is running out of fuel and will shut down within several months, according to the agency. The groundbreaking space observatory has discovered more than 2,300 planets. After nine years in flight around Earth’s orbit, the telescope has defied the limits of the original mission plan and survived every mechanical malfunction, beaming back […]

31 JUL

Kepler data may hold a Neptune-sized surprise, our first exomoon

Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) One of the most important things we’ve learned from the Kepler mission is that, in many ways, our Solar System isn’t unique. Lots of stars have planets, many have multiple planets, and the list of planets includes many with sizes and densities similar to our eight planets. But there are lots of […]