NASA’s planet-hunter spacecraft finally dies after nine years

NASA has announced that its planet-hunting telescope has finally died as it ran out of fuel after serving for nine years.

Space agency NASA announced on Tuesday that after nine years, its planet-hunting orbital telescope Kepler, which has been spotting and analyzing far away planets, has ran out of fuel putting an end to its research.

NASA’s planet-hunter satellite sends first star-filled magnificent image

As per Futurism, NASA launched the telescope back in March 2009 and was expected to carry out its tasks for four years. However, the telescope continued its search for five more years. The telescope till yet identified more than 2,600 planets outside our solar system. It discovered that half of those stars visible from Earth could be surrounded by small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

The Kepler Space Telescope was running out of fuel since July this year. It has been putting the spacecraft to sleep multiple times over the past few months in order to preserve what fuel it had left. Since then, NASA had been planning a replacement to take over the satellite’s ongoing search for exoplanets, wrote Engadget.