Kepler is being retired into a safe orbit 94 million miles away from the Earth, after being the agency's first mission to successfully find Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zones of their stars NASA said. Kepler, which launched back in 2009, came to be known by its team as 'the little spacecraft that could,' going above and beyond the expectations NASA had for it. “NASA has decided to retire the spacecraft within its current safe orbit away from Earth.”

Kepler leaves a legacy of more than 2,600 planet discoveries from outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life, NASA said. “We collected every last bit of science data, and in the end, we didn’t have a drop of fuel left over for anything else,” said Charlie Sobeck, the Kepler mission’s former project manager and chief engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

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Before Kepler launched in 2009, nobody knew whether planets like the ones in our solar system were common or rare in the cosmos. “Now we know because of the Kepler Space Telescope and its science mission that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy.”

Almost lost in 2013 because of equipment failure, Kepler was salvaged by engineers and kept peering into the cosmos, thick with stars and galaxies, ever on the lookout for dips in in the brightness of stars that could indicate an orbiting planet. “It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,” William Borucki, who led the original Kepler science team, told AP of the telescope’s technology,

When Kepler’s stabilizing equipment began malfunctioning in 2013, NASA feared it was doomed. Borucki, who dreamed up the mission decades ago, said one of his favorite discoveries was Kepler 22b, a water planet bigger than Earth but where it is not too warm and not too cold — the type “that could lead to life.”

A successor to Kepler launched in April, NASA’s Tess spacecraft, has its sights on stars closer to home.
NASA announces that the Kepler spacecraft has expended all its fuel and will be retired after nearly 10 years of service, having found more than 2,600 exoplanets.