🛰️ Mission
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
- Launched
- 7 March 2009, 17 years ago
- Worked for
- 9 years, until 30 October 2018
- Built by
- NASA
- Sees
- Ordinary light
- Where it is
- Followed Earth around the Sun
- Best known for
- Proved that planets are ordinary: it confirmed more than 2,700 of them, and showed there are more planets than stars
Did you know?
- It found planets by watching stars dim. A planet like Earth crossing a star like the Sun dims it by about one part in ten thousand.
- It ran out of fuel in 2018 and was left in a safe orbit around the Sun, where it still is.
What it showed us
Kepler-452 b
A bigger, older cousin of Earth around a Sun-like star.
Kepler-186 f
The first Earth-sized planet found where water could be liquid.
More NASA photos of KeplerStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.
GALEX
Ten years of the ultraviolet sky.