NASA put its famous planet-hunting telescope to sleep because it’s almost out of fuel
The Kepler Space Telescope is almost out of fuel, which means its life is coming to an end, NASA announced today. The space agency says it put the planet-hunting spacecraft into a “hibernation” safe mode this past Monday, and that a plan to reactivate Kepler next month could burn out whatever fuel remains.
NASA launched the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009 in an effort to learn more about the number and frequency of planets in our galaxy. To the delight of many, scientists using Kepler have found an abundance of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. The spacecraft, which is some 94 million miles away from Earth, has scanned just a small section of our galactic neighborhood, but its efforts have led scientists to discover 2,650...