Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), the most versatile spectrograph ever to fly on Hubble, ceased operations in August 2004 due to the failure of its power supply. The STIS instrument's ac...

The artist's concept depicts Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the sun, located about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation L...

Astronomers can detect the presence of disks of dust orbiting distant stars by measuring how the combined light from the star and disk changes across different wavelengths.

NASA's Kepler mission revealed that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy. It opened our eyes to diverse worlds – some entirely unlike planets found in our solar system.

Of the more than 1,000 verified planets found by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, eight are less than twice Earth-size and in their stars' habitable zone. All eight orbit stars cooler and smaller tha...

A night test of a small-scale starshade model shows how the starshade could block bright light from telescopes.

Within our own solar system we can observe planetary transits of Mercury and Venus when they pass in front of the Sun as viewed from Earth. Kepler will observe the same phenomena in order to detect...

This infographic explains how NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope can be used in tandem with a telescope on the ground to measure the distances to planets discovered using the "microlensing" technique.

The first Earth-size planet discovered around a near solar twin, the discovery of Kepler-452b brings us closer than ever to finding an Earth-like planet.

An animation depicting various orbit geometries, some of which permit view of transits, and others that do not.

Kepler does not directly observe the image of a planet. Rather it observes the effect the planet has on its parent star. If the orbit of the planet is aligned along Kepler's line of sight to the st...

Every star has a habitable zone, but where that zone lies is different for stars of different sizes and brightness.

NASA has confirmed more than 5,000 worlds beyond our solar system during 30 years of exploration. There are billions of exoplanets in our galaxy alone, so many more discoveries await.

This artist's animation shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury.

Kepler focal plane assembly in a clean room.

This slide explains some of the history of exoplanet detection over the last 30+ years.

This illustration shows the unusual orbit of planet Kepler-413b around a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars. The planet's 66-day orbit is tilted 2.5 degrees with respect to the plane of the b...

A furled model of the first starshade built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is shown in an Astro Aerospace/Northrup Grumman facility in Santa Barbara, California in 2013.

The results from Kepler will come from measuring the brightness of the stars. The data will look like an EKG showing the heart beat. Whenever a planet passes in front of its parent star as viewed f...

Over its ten years in space, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has evolved into a premier tool for studying exoplanets.

The habitable zone is the distance from a star where one can have liquid water on the surface of a planet. If a planet is too close to its parent star, it will be too hot and water would have evapo...

Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery mission. It is designed specifically to detect Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zone of solar-like stars.

The stars TESS studies are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed, enabling far easier follow-up observations with both ground-based and space-based telesc...

This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system -- multiple planets orbiting two suns – 4,900 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus.

This image from NASA's Kepler mission shows the telescope's full field of view -- an expansive star-rich patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.