CARL SAGAN 85 years on
“As a boy Kepler had been captured by a vision of cosmic splendour, a harmony of the worlds which he sought so tirelessly all his life” Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
Sagan’s admiration of Johannes Kepler, the 16th to 17th century German astronomer who formulated laws of planetary motion and provided some of the work Newton’s theory of universal gravitation would be built upon, is shared by many at NASA, it seems. Sagan was particularly prophetic here, speaking of Kepler seeking worlds his entire life, as it was the Kepler space telescope, named after the astronomer, that would have this as its mission.
The spacecraft, now retired, was launched in 2009 with a mission to survey a small portion of the Milky Way for Earth-sized exoplanets in or near the habitable zone around their host stars. Not only did Kepler discover 2,662 exoplanets, having surveyed over half a million stars, but it kept working for 9.6 years, far in excess of its initial 3.5-year life expectancy. Even when its reaction wheels had failed, robbing it of the accuracy to collect exoplanet data, Kepler kept on working, its new mission to search a larger area of the galaxy
