(Wind rushes by, crickets chirp)
Bill Borucki: For thousands of years, mankind has
wondered "Are there planets around other stars?"
"Is there life out there?"
But we didn't know.
We didn't know if there were any planets
around other stars.
Launch Announcer: Zero and liftoff of the Delta Two
rocket with Kepler, on a search for planets
in some way like our own.
Courtney Dressing: Before the launch of Kepler,
most of the planets we knew about were really big
planets, like Jupiter.
But Kepler was so sensitive, that we started
finding smaller and smaller planets.
Natalie Batalha: We discovered planets smaller
than had ever been discovered before
and just, many of them.
Indicating that the galaxy is full of planets.
Crazy worlds that we didn't predict,
things that we hadn't imagined.
We find planets orbiting so close to their
parent star that the star-facing side has
temperatures in excess of that required to melt iron.
These planets have an entire hemisphere
that's like a liquid ocean.
But it's not an ocean of water.
It's an ocean of molten rock.
We see planets that are orbiting
not one but two stars.
That is, if you look in the east
you would see not one star rise but two.
(Star Wars theme music plays)
Nick Gautier: Almost all the astronomers that I
know grew up reading science fiction.
That's why a lot of them got into the business
of looking for planets in the first place.
To find out if any of this, you know,
fantastic speculation that inspired us,
could be true.
And now we find out that, yeah, it could be true.
Courtney Dressing: We learned from Kepler that
the most common types of planets in the galaxy are
unlike the planets in our own solar system.
These worlds are intermediate in size between
the Earth and Neptune, but we're not exactly sure
what they're made of.
Jessie Dotson: What are the things that we know now,
that we didn't know then?
I mean, things like planets are ubiquitous.
Planets are diverse.
The stars that we find planets around are diverse.
The systems that planets live in vary widely.
Jon Jenkins: It was breath-taking to see all the
planets come rolling in from this exquisite data
over the years that we were
collecting data with Kepler.
In the end, we found dozens of small,
potentially rocky worlds orbiting in the
"Goldilocks zone" of their stars.
That distance at which you could have liquid water
pooling on the surface of the planet,
capable of supporting life as we know it.
Steve Howell: The science value of the collected
data spans almost every field of astronomy
and planetary science.
It revolutionized not just exoplanets,
not just stars, but a large number of the
scientific fields of astronomy today.
Jessie Dotson: There was one summer where I worked
at an observatory and I would go outside at night
and look up at the stars and just be blown away
at how vast space was.
And I actually felt a little lonely.
And when I go out and I look at the night sky now,
rather than being awestrucken by the vastness,
I'm awestrucken by the possibility.
Jon Jenkins: There aren't that many opportunities
in life where you get to participate in a project
as important as Kepler is that answers such
a fundamental question that we've been asking
ourselves for so long.
Now we know when we look up into the night sky
that every star we see has , on average,
at least one planet.
And that many of those planets are similar in size
to the Earth and a chance for life as we know it elsewhere.
Thomas Zurbuchen: Searching for life elsewhere is
one of the key themes that drive our science
portfolio and at the center of that is Kepler.
New missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Satellite, TESS, and the James Webb Space Telescope
will build on Kepler's success and
take our search for life to new heights.
Bill Borucki: It has been extremely gratifying to
see the data come back from the mission and show
what we wanted to know, give us the answer.
Many stars have planets, a lot of these planets
are Earth-sized.
That's Kepler's legacy.
This new knowledge that we have
about planets around other stars.
(Music comes to crescendo ands fade out)