Kepler Telescope Kicks of Second-Life K2 Mission By Spotting Another 'Super-Earth'

NASA's Kepler Telescope rallied from a crippling malfunction more than a year ago to spot a new alien exoplanet for the first time since.

According to Space.com, authors of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal identified the new "super-Earth" as HIP 116454b. Already one down, another one of Kepler's four wheels broke in May 2013 and NASA scientists believed the telescope would have been rendered useless, so they took to reviewing the data it already gathered.

"Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Kepler has been reborn and is continuing to make discoveries," study lead author Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a press release. "Even better, the planet it found is ripe for follow-up studies."

HIP is 2.5 times the size of Earth and lies about 180 light years from us in the Pisces constellation. NASA launched Kepler's satellite companion in March of 2009 to seek out Earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. The prolific spacecraft signals the existence of a new exoplanet with a method where it observes a dimming from another spatial object - like a star or moon - pass in front of it.

NASA gave the K2 mission the go-ahead this May to give Kepler a new life and HIP was the first exoplanet the telescope spotted in its new mission.

"Last summer, the possibility of a scientifically productive mission for Kepler after its reaction wheel failure in its extended mission was not part of the conversation," Paul Hertz, NASA's astrophysics division director, said in a statement. "Today, thanks to an innovative idea and lots of hard work by the NASA and Ball Aerospace team, Kepler may well deliver the first candidates for follow-up study by the James Webb Space Telescope to characterize the atmospheres of distant worlds and search for signatures of life."