NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has been hard at work for almost 10 years, helping us find and catalogue thousands of distant planets and stars.
Unfortunately, it's now finally run out of fuel, which means the iconic telescope is being taken offline for good.
Kepler illustration - NASA
Ever since its launch in 2009, the Kepler telescope has helped us discover close to 2,700 exoplanets and star systems. It was equipped with the "largest digital camera outfitted for outer space observations at that time," NASA writes. Before it started up, scientists had very little knowledge of planets outside our solar system.
NASA first realized the telescope was running low on fuel when it noticed a drop in fuel pressure levels back in March. Until then, it had been going strong despite a malfunctioning steering system in 2012. The $600 million spacecraft served almost 10 years, far longer than the four year mission it was built for. For the past couple of months, it's just been transmitting all its captured data back to Earth.
"As NASA's first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said. "Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars."
The massively more powerful Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which was launched earlier in April this year aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will take over Kepler's duties. In fact, it's projected to discover over 20,000 new planets.
Any day now, NASA will send the space telescope a deactivation command over 94 million miles away. After that, it'll continue to trail Earth's orbit at a safe distance, a permanent monument of the little telescope that could.