NASA’s Kepler space telescope is running out of fuel

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Without a fuel gauge, Kepler’s demise is simply estimation, and it hasn’t shown signs of slowing down just yet. NASA is continually monitoring the craft for signs of low fuel, like changes in thruster performance and fuel tank pressure, but no warnings have arisen so far. Kepler will continue to carry out research campaigns and send scientific data back to Earth until its thrusters, which are needed to aim the spacecraft and transmit data, begin to show signs of fuel depletion.

Spacecraft typically have to reserve fuel for a final finish, like Cassini’s final descent into Saturn’s atmosphere, so they don’t collide with other satellites, contaminate extraterrestrial environments, or come crashing down to Earth. Kepler, however, is in an isolated area 94 million miles (151 million kilometers) from Earth, so its last bit of fuel can be used to continue observing and collecting data.

Wiki link on the telescope

Designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets in or near habitable zones and estimate how many of the billions of stars in the Milky Way have such planets,[5][9][10] Kepler's sole scientific instrument is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of approx 150,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view.[11] These data are transmitted to Earth, then analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by exoplanets that cross in front of their host star.





List of exoplanets confirmed using Kepler