14 DAY TRIAL // For the past few years, the Herschel space telescope has been providing some never before seen views of the universe. But because it had a limited fuel supply – used to keep the telescope very, very cold – its mission was a limited one.
Now, that mission is over. With the fuel gone, the instruments will heat up to the point where they're no longer useful for any scientific measurements.
Herschel was designed to capture far-infrared and submillimeter light and it was the most accurate and most expensive tool of its kind.
The telescope will be put on a trajectory towards the Sun and will circle our center star in a stable orbit. It won't be near Earth for a few hundreds of years.
While the telescope's active mission is over, the massive amounts of data that it gathered will take years to analyze, meaning that the greatest discoveries and contributions may be yet to come.