The space telescope Kepler has run out of gas and will be out of service after a nine-and-a-half-year mission to monitor thousands of planets outside our solar system and help search for worlds that may be inhabited by space creatures, NASA said.
NASA said Kepler, now orbiting the sun about 156 million kilometers from Earth, would be farther from our planet when mission engineers turn off wireless transmitters.
The telescope revealed the diversity of planets in the Milky Way galaxy by finding that distant star systems encompass billions of planets and also helped discover the first known moon outside the solar system.
The Kepler telescope has detected more than 2,600 of the 3,800 planets outside the solar system that have been documented over the past 20 years.
The telescope was disrupted by 2013, almost four years after its launch, but scientists found a way to continue the work, but the telescope fuel needed to do more operations ran out, leaving it out of service.
"Kepler's nine-and-a-half-year trip was more than double the target," said Charlie Subic, a systems engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, .
The satellite probes of the planets outside the solar system, known as Tess and launched in April, replaced Kepler.
The TICE mission lasts two years and costs $ 337 million.
NASA launched Kepler on March 6, 2009 to see if Earth-like planets, on which life may exist, are common in other star systems.
During his mission, Kepler recorded 2,681 planets and 2,899 objects, each of which could be a total of 5,580 planets. The figure includes about 50 planets, which may be about the same size and temperature of the earth.
