As of Nov 15, 2018 NASA has finally said good bye to Kepler Telescope that was launched in march 2009, at a cost of 700 million dollars. NASA has to decommission the telescope because it has run out of fuel and can no longer serve the purpose.
Kepler was launched by NASA to find earth like planets in our galaxy. Kepler helped NASA to find around 2682 exoplanets to date.
Kepler is currently 151 million kilometers from earth and it is orbiting around sun. It can not be refueled or brought back to the mission.
From kepler mission Nasa found out that there are 3 kinds of exoplanets out there.
- gas giants,
- hot-super-Earths in short period orbits, and
- ice giants
This mission was mainly used :
To find terrestrial and big planets that lie in habitable zone.
To find shape and sizes of the orbits of these planets.
To find total how many planets are there in a star system.