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Kepler Space Telescope

defunct NASA space telescope

AI overview

The Kepler Space Telescope was a NASA spacecraft designed to search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars by measuring tiny changes in their brightness. It mattered because it discovered thousands of exoplanets, fundamentally expanding our understanding of how common planets are throughout the universe.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

In the Vinony graph

Vinony's link graph records 1,506 inbound references to Kepler Space Telescope, and connects out to Orbiting Solar Observatory, list of planets discovered by the Kepler spacecraft and The Astrophysical Journal.

It sits within the topics Derelict space probes, Discovery Program and Exoplanet search projects.

Vinony links it to 72 Wikipedia language editions.

Wikidata facts

Diameter: 2.7
Mass: 11.7
Orbital period: 372.57
Official website: kepler.nasa.gov
Image: Kepler Space Telescope spacecraft model 2.png
Length: 4.7

Show 15 more facts

Commons category: Kepler (spacecraft)
UTC date of spacecraft launch: 2009-03-07
web feed URL: www.nasa.gov/rss/dyn/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-newsandfeatures-RSS.rss
service entry: 2009-05-13
semi-major axis of an orbit: 1.0133
orbital eccentricity: 0.036095
periapsis: 0.97673
apoapsis: 1.0499
orbital inclination: 0.44765
argument of periapsis: 294.07
mean anomaly: 242.48
nominal power output: 1100
service retirement: 2018-11-15
service life: 9.69
native label: Kepler Space Telescope

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Encyclopedic overview

The Kepler space telescope was a space telescope launched by NASA in 2009 to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. The principal investigator was William J. Borucki. After nine and a half years of operation, the telescope's reaction control system fuel was depleted, and NASA announced its retirement on October 30, 2018.

Designed to survey a portion of Earth's region of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets in or near habitable zones and to estimate how many of the billions of stars in the Milky Way have such planets, Kepler's sole scientific instrument is a photometer that continually monitored the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view. These data were transmitted to Earth, then analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by exoplanets that cross in front of their host star. Only planets whose orbits are seen edge-on from Earth could be detected. Kepler observed 530,506 stars, and had detected 2,778 confirmed planets as of June 16, 2023.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Kepler Space Telescope” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.