According to the Science and Technology Daily, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Kepler Space Telescope is the world's first spacecraft dedicated to the search for planets outside the solar system, known as the 'planetary catcher'. According to the British "Independent" recently reported that due to fuel Coming soon, Kepler has turned on sleep mode.
In the past 10 years, the Kepler Space Telescope has scanned more than 150,000 stars and continuously transmitted data back to Earth, helping scientists to make many amazing and important discoveries, including the first observations of planets outside the solar system. But now, one of the NASA's most important telescopes is forced to go to sleep to save fuel.
Kepler's sleep time will last until the beginning of August, when the engineer will wake it up, directing the airborne antenna to point to the earth and start to return data. If all goes well, Kepler will use it after completing the data return. The remaining fuel carries out the final observation mission.
According to NASA, the data returned can help astronomers identify previously discovered exoplanets and possibly discover new planets. Therefore, the remaining fuel must first be guaranteed to return data. NASA expects Kepler's fuel to be Depleted in the next few months.
The Kepler telescope was launched in 2009. The initial mission was to scan a small area of the sky. The mission was continued until 2016. But on May 11, 2013, the telescope had a critical fault and could not accurately determine the original sky area. Positioning. Since 2014, the Kepler telescope has entered the K2 phase (Kepler Mission 2). To date, it has discovered nearly 3,000 confirmed celestial bodies and many potential planetary candidates.
In April of this year, NASA's new detector for the search for exoplanets, Tess (TESS, the Lingriex Exoplanet Survey Satellite), was launched and will replace Kepler who completed the mission.
