Concept Art of Kepler hunting for exoplanets, planets that lie outside of our own solar system. (All image rights are given to NASA)

Hello all Astro enthusiasts,

You may have all heard the sad news of NASA’s Kepler space-based telescope encountering a failure in one of its reaction wheels back in May, well, despite after months of attempted recovery of the telescope NASA has sadly had to ‘call it a day’ and give up any hope of this wonderful piece of inspiring astronomy sparking back into life.

What was Kepler?

Kepler is a spaced-based telescope named after the scientist ‘Johannes Kepler’, who is famous for transcribing the 3 laws of planetary motion, developed by NASA its aim was to analyse and survey the ‘Light Curves’ of over a 150,000 stars in a fixed field of view (FOV). What was the reason for performing such a survey? To detect the 1% dip in brightness of a star that could be potentially have been caused by a distant planet, orbiting around a distant star, what Astronomers would call an ‘Exoplanet Transit’; like the moon eclipsing the sun in a total solar eclipse, a distant planet can effectively eclipse part of a distant star’s light. Kepler could read and resolve/see these small ‘blips’, and as a result the data obtained from Kepler has confirmed the existence of over 503 planets that orbit around other stars, in other words planets are a very common occurrence during the birth of stars.

As a result, it’s sad that Kepler won’t be bringing back any more new data, but there is still a lot of data that needs crunching and analysed, so all is not completely lost and there are still exciting times ahead.

For more on this, then please click here: http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=292

Speak to you soon Astrogeeks,

The ObsAstro