A NASA spacecraft that hunts for alien worlds will soon run out of fuel

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been peering deep into the Milky Way galaxy for nearly a decade. It has spotted over 2,500 confirmed planets orbiting distant stars, and over 2,500 more possible worlds are waiting to be confirmed. Thirty of these confirmed planets live inside their host stars' habitable zones, places where liquid water could exist like it does on Earth.

But Kepler is now running low on gas.

"With nary a gas station to be found in deep space, the spacecraft is going to run out of fuel," Charlie Sobeck, the system engineer for the Kepler space telescope mission, said in a NASA statement.  Read more...