Kepler Space Telescope

Mission Profile

Kepler Space Telescope was NASA's groundbreaking exoplanet hunting observatory, launched on 7 March 2009 aboard a Delta II 7925-10L to a heliocentric orbit where it continuously monitored over 150,000 main sequence stars for planetary transits. Over its nine-year mission Kepler confirmed the existence of 2,662 exoplanets and demonstrated that most stars host planetary systems, fundamentally transforming understanding of the frequency and diversity of worlds throughout the galaxy. A reaction wheel failure in 2013 ended the primary mission, but an ingenious recovery campaign using solar pressure for stabilization enabled the K2 mission, which discovered hundreds of additional planets. Kepler's statistical census showed that Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars are common throughout the Milky Way.