Aug 16, 2013 02:06 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

NASA's Kepler telescope could not come back from a hobbling malfunction that disabled a wheel in its pointing system, the New York Times reported.

The telescope will never search for stars and other planets again after the problem was deemed unfixable. The second of four wheels broke down in May, rendering the telescope's pointing system useless and unable to stay steady.

Kepler's satellite is still in perfect working condition and NASA has asked astronomers to work out other uses for the crippled telescope. Still, Kepler will leave behind a storied legacy for similar ones to follow.

"The most exciting discoveries are going to come in the next few years as we search through this data," William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif., Kepler's originator and principal investigator told reporters on Thursday. "In the next few years we're going to be able to answer the questions that inspired Kepler: Are Earthlike planets common or rare in the galaxy?"

At the latest count, Kepler had spotted 3.548 potential planets, 135 validated by other telescopes. Borucki said hundreds of thousands more are currently being investigated.

Kepler was launched in March 2009 to orbit the sun and to determine which stars in the galaxy hosted Earth-like planets.

"What we're looking for is a planet that's really Earth-sized around a star just like the Sun, and that's what we're hoping will be in this data that we have yet to fully analysis," Borucki told BBC News.

The telescope first experienced trouble just over a year ago in July 2012 when one wheel failed. After the second one went down in May, officials likened the difficulty to pushing a shopping cart with a jammed wheel.

"The wheels are sufficiently damaged that they cannot sustain spacecraft pointing and control for any extended period of time," confirmed Charles Sobeck, Kepler's deputy project manager.

But Borucki said while possible uses for the Kepler are explored, scientists will have a trove of data already collected by Kepler to review.

"We're going have to dig down hard to find those planets," Borucki said. "We know we can do it."

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