The Kepler spacecraft is running out of fuel - by @bigbear

in astronomy •  7 years ago 

The spacecraft has found 2300 new planets across its two trips.

It is reckoned that the craft has on months left of fuel but it has surprised NASA before so they are trying to get as much information as they can, for as long as possible.

Image Credit

When the opportunity arises they will take final calibration data with the last fuel. This can only be done if the opportunity arises.

The first of the rocky alien planets that was found looked like this.

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The eight one of the 15 discovered looked like this.

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In December 2011, astronomers announced the discovery of Kepler-22b, the Kepler mission's first potentially life-supporting planet. Kepler-22b is 2.4 times as large as Earth and orbits a star very much like our sun.

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The tiny alien planet Kepler-37b, which was announced in February 2013, is slightly larger than Earth's moon and orbits its host star every 13 days.

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Year after year, NASA continue with finding more planet like earth that supports life form. I guess these new discover planets may take like 2 million light years away

Hopefully, it will have enough fuel for a few months.
Anyways, scientists still have plenty of not checked information from Kepler.
It will take a lot of time to encrypt that ))
Anyways, the TESS spacecraft will be sended instead of Kepler!