Lee Reedy, flight director for Kepler at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), said that the Kepler mission’s legacy is far from over. To date, it has found a confirmed 2,662 planets beyond our solar system. “And while it will no longer collect data, Kepler will live for a dozen years or more because there are going to be people mining the data it has collected for at least that long,” he said.