Planethunter Kepler put to rest with ‘goodnight’ command

WASHINGTON: NASA’S Kepler space telescope, which discovered thousands of planets outside our solar system and revealed that our galaxy contains more planets than stars, has received its final command to disconnect communications with Earth.

The “goodnight” command finalises the spacecraft’s transition into retirement, which began on October 30 with NASA’S announcement that Kepler had run out of fuel and could no longer carry on, the US space agency said in a statement late on Friday.

Coincidentally, Kepler’s “goodnight” falls on the same date as the 388-year anniversary of the death of its namesake, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion and passed away on November 15, 1630.

The Kepler space telescope has had a profound impact on our understanding of the number of worlds that exist beyond our solar system. Kepler’s more advanced successor is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched this April.

TESS builds on Kepler’s foundation with fresh batches of data in its search for planets in orbit around some 200,000 of the nearest stars to Earth.

The spacecraft was drifting in a safe orbit around the Sun, 94 million miles away from Earth.

Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler telescope combined cutting-edge technique in measuring stellar brightness with the largest digital camera outfitted for outer space observations at that time.