RIP Kepler: NASA sends final 'goodnight' command to shut down planet-hunting spacecraft that discovered 2,600 exoplanets
Mark Prigg and Cheyenne Macdonald 11 hrs ago
NASA has finally shut down its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft.
The space agency confirmed on the evening of Thursday, Nov. 15, Kepler received its final set of commands to disconnect communications with Earth - nine years after it blasted off.
The 'goodnight' commands finalize the spacecraft's transition into retirement, which began on Oct. 30 with NASA's announcement that Kepler had run out of fuel and could no longer conduct science.
Kepler's 'goodnight' falls on the same date as the 388-year anniversary of the death of its namesake, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion and passed away on Nov. 15, 1630.
The final commands were sent over NASA's Deep Space Network from Kepler's operations center at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
LASP runs the spacecraft's operations on behalf of NASA and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.