NASA's Famous Planet Hunter Is running Out Of fuel Furthermore its Running out Of time
NASA is unable to determine the exact amount of fuel left within Kepler, as there is no onboard gas gauge. However, since it is in deep space trailing the Earth’s orbit at roughly 94 million miles away, and there is no risk of it hitting another potentially life-bearing astronomical body such as an icy moon, the agency is free to keep working the spacecraft until it gives up and dies.
"Our current estimates are that Kepler's tank will run dry within several months — but we've been surprised by its performance before! So, while we anticipate flight operations ending soon, we are prepared to continue as long as the fuel allows," Charlie Sobeck, system engineer for the Kepler mission, said in a NASA statement.
The $600 million Kepler mission launched in 2009 to search for exoplanets in a fixed location in the constellation Cygnus. For four years, it watched the stars for the telltale dimming that occurs when an exoplanet crosses the face of a star. The mission's ultimate aim was to find rocky exoplanets that were Earth-size or smaller — a type of planet rarely found when Kepler went into orbit. But within a few years, Kepler's data showed that rocky planets are extremely common in the universe.
NASA’s storied Kepler Space Telescope—the craft which has discovered thousands of exoplanets since its launch in 2009—is entering the retirement phase of its lifespan. NASA announced on Friday that Kepler staff had “received an indication that the spacecraft fuel tank is running very low” and “placed the spacecraft in a hibernation-like state in preparation to download the science data collected in its latest observation campaign.”
We can afford to squeeze every last drop of data from the spacecraft — and ultimately that means bringing home even more data for science," Sobeck said. "Who knows what surprises about our universe will be in that final downlink to Earth?"