NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope: Discovering Planets Outside the Solar System

SPACE — The American Space Agency (NASA) has various types of telescopes. These telescopes were made for different purposes. Among the telescopes that NASA has is Kepler.

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is an observatory in outer space dedicated to discovering planets outside the solar system. The focus is specifically on finding planets that might resemble Earth.

Reported from Space, the observatory was in operation for less than nine years. Kepler was launched in March 2009 and decommissioned on November 15, 2018.

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Since Kepler was launched, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, or exoplanets through this telescope alone. Most of these planets are between Earth and Neptune in size (i.e. four times the size of Earth).

Many of these planets are found in the region of the constellation Cygnus. Cygnus was indeed Kepler’s location for the first four years of its mission.

As of November 2020, Kepler has been credited with finding 2,392 exoplanets, and 2,368 planet candidates are awaiting confirmation.

The Kepler mission is continuing well beyond its scheduled end date. Kepler experienced mechanical problems in 2013, forcing mission managers to create a modified “K2” mission.

Kepler uses the pressure of sunlight to stabilize its observatory, shifting its gaze to different points of the sky.

How did the Kepler mission begin?

Kepler is the brainchild of NASA scientist William J. Borucki. He had been working on science instruments for the Apollo program.

Since 1983, Borucki began advocating for NASA for a mission that would search for exoplanets by observing transits. A transit is an event where a planet passes in front of its star as seen from Earth’s perspective.

The Borucki concept was rejected by NASA four times. Borucki continues to work to ensure that the mission is technologically and financially feasible. NASA finally approved the mission in 2001.

Kepler is part of NASA’s Discovery program, which funds low-cost spacecraft for solar system exploration. Kepler was chosen at the same time as Dawn, a spacecraft that visited the dwarf planets Vesta and Ceres.

In a lecture at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, Borucki described Kepler observing more than 170,000 stars simultaneously. Kepler looks for planets that cross their star and block some of the light.

By blocking the light we can find out how big the planet is compared to the star. If observations are made repeatedly scientists can find out the orbital period.

“From Kepler’s third law we can infer how far the planet is from the star. And by looking at the properties of the star we can find out how hot the planet is,” he said.