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Kepler will now be seen as a crucial mission for

Nov. 10, 2018 by Carolyn Mueller

Kepler will now be seen as a crucial mission for scientists to understand, better understand, and use in the future. That fact will make it a key piece in a broader effort to understand the cosmos. "We've been working on the Kepler mission for six years, so we'll be able to look at it in the future," said Kellie Geer, a member of NASA's mission team and principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "There's a long history of Kepler missions, and they've been very successful, so we hope to see more."

Kepler is the first mission to use a very small sample from a star in the habitable zone, which is where the gas cloud is so massive that even tiny particles can pass through. At its closest approach to Earth, Kepler is about 1.1 million light-years away, and by that distance, it has about 1,000 habitable planets. In the habitable zone, only a tiny fraction of those planets could survive. Kepler's first encounter with Earth was at a distance of about 300 million light-years from Earth, when it discovered an orbit for a star named Kepler-33, a dwarf star found in the outer Solar System in 2004. The result was that the tiny planet, called K-G.

Kepler's scientists expect to complete its mission in 2021 to explore further, to better understand what makes a planet suitable for life. These discoveries will help scientists better understand the structure of the planetary system around the same time that Kepler gets its first look at the planet K-G. "Kepler gets to know how we're interacting with this system," said Paul Hertz, a member of Kepler's mission team. "It's our first glimpse in a whole new way of looking at a system."

This time, Kepler will get to see the whole story. This time, Kepler will not just get to see the K-G. It will make use of Kepler's data to build new, larger telescopes to probe this faraway star and other planets, and to send it to a new target, like the Milky Way. Kepler is already the world's largest telescope—more than 10 times the size of the Milky Way—and it's used to detect a wide variety of dark stars and to study the atmospheres of stars like the Milky Way.