
The astronomer Johannes Kepler When was the Kepler Telescope First Launched? In December 2001, the Kepler telescope received the green light.Ĭonsidering its primary goal was to unearth potentially habitable planets similar to Earth and given the foundational reliance on Kepler’s laws of planetary motion for such discoveries, naming the telescope in his honor felt inherently fitting. It took nearly a decade, encompassing four rejected proposals, before the dream materialized. However, it wasn’t a straightforward journey. Their main objective? To explore the vast universe for planets revolving around distant stars. These principles have empowered astronomers to precisely forecast the positions of planets throughout time.įast forward to four centuries later, when NASA, in the early 1990s, envisioned a new line of telescopes. He is best known for introducing the groundbreaking laws of planetary motion.


Johannes Kepler, a renowned German astronomer from the late 16th to the early 17th century, is the namesake of this modern marvel. The tradition of naming cutting-edge space equipment after legendary astronomers has a rich history, and the Kepler Space Telescope proudly continues this tradition. While that telescope’s name is certainly worthy of its fame, there’s another that, arguably, has done as much to broaden our cosmological horizons as its more famous sibling: the Kepler space telescope. Ask most people to name a space telescope, and they’ll probably tell you Hubble.
