National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has decided to retire the Kepler space telescope.
It has run out of fuel after a 9-1/2-year mission. During this period, it detected more than 2,600 planet discoveries from outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life.
Kepler Space Telescope
It is an unmanned space observatory and it was originally launched in 2009 as a part of NASA’s Discovery Program.
Kepler was the first telescope to find a planet (Kepler-69c) approximately the size of Earth in the habitable region of a star.
It examined the TRAPPIST-1 system which likely has multiple Earth-sized planets in it between December 2016 and March 2017.