On November 15, 2018 NASA, officially bid farewell to its iconic planet hunter, the Kepler Space Telescope, as it ran of fuel. Peering into deep space, the observatory discovered as many as 2,662 exoplanets in just nine years. The Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009 to find out how many earth-sized planets are there in the habitable zones of other stars in the Milky-way. Kepler hunted planets in a surprisingly straightforward manner. By fixating on a specific area of the sky in the constellation Cygnus, Kepler was able to continuously monitor the varying brightnesses of roughly 150,000 stars.
Although Kepler is now retired, its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has already begun operation. Launched on April 18, 2018, TESS carries forward Kepler’s planet-hunting legacy by searching for exoplanets around nearly 200,000 of the brightest and nearest stars to Earth.
Picture Credit : Google