Kepler telescope

More than 5,000 exoplanets have already been discovered in the Milky Way, mostly with NASA’s Kepler telescope, which was in use for 9 years before it ran out of fuel in 2018.

“Our satellite can be 10–15 times more powerful than NASA’s Kepler telescope in its sky-surveying capacity,” says Ge.

Six of the telescopes will work together to survey the Cygnus–Lyra constellations, the same patch of sky that the Kepler telescope scoured.

Kepler-10b was the first rocky planet to be discovered by the Kepler telescope, in 2011.

The chip is a popular one for spacecraft, too: in addition to Perseverance and Curiosity, it also powers the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler telescope, among others.