A Blip on a Telescope in a Colorado Parking Lot Bolstered a Space Mission That Has Found Thousands of Planets … and Counting

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A small telescope glitch detected in a Colorado parking lot proved crucial to NASA's Kepler space mission, which has discovered thousands of exoplanets since its launch in 2009. Engineers traced a mysterious signal anomaly to a ground station's equipment, a fix that kept the aging spacecraft functional years beyond its original design life. Kepler's unexpected longevity transformed astronomy by revealing that planets are far more common than scientists once believed, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of the cosmos and the likelihood of life elsewhere.