Kepler Space Telescope

An illustration of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. The colors depicted in this illustration are for artistic purposes only.

Kepler was a planet-hunting space telescope designed to discover Earth-size and larger planets orbiting in or near the habitable zones of their stars. Kepler surveyed our neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy and, throughout its lifetime, observed over half a million stars, enabling the discovery of over 3,200 planets. The Kepler mission revealed that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy.

Launched: March 7, 2009
Decommissioned: October 30, 2018