NASA scientists and engineers announced on Thursday that the Kepler spacecraft has made its first find for its comeback mission. Its latest discovery is a "super Earth," an alien planet that is 2.5 times larger than Earth.
Kepler is a space observatory designed to find other Earth-like planets from other stars. To date, it has found 996 confirmed exoplanets located in 400 stars. NASA scientists and engineers are still looking at 3,216 unconfirmed exoplanets previously discovered by the spacecraft.
In August 2013, two of its four reaction wheels broke down, and the space agency decided not to fix them. The team tried to look for other options, but ended up restoring the spacecraft for another mission called "K2" or "Second Light." The new mission aimed to collect data on supernova explosions and star formations and also to search for asteroids, comets and more exoplanets.
Now, after more than a year, Kepler has proven that it could still do its job after spotting its first new alien planet since May 2013. The new exoplanet was dubbed as HIP 116454b and is located 180 light-years away from Earth. It is also more than twice the size of our planet.
The new super Earth's location is close enough for the scientists to study it. They plan to launch follow-up ground studies to measure its mass and density to determine if it is mostly made of rock, water or gas.
"The Kepler mission showed us that planets larger in size than Earth and smaller than Neptune are common in the galaxy, yet they are absent in our solar system," Steve Howell, Kepler/K2 project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a NASA press release. "K2 is uniquely positioned to dramatically refine our understanding of these alien worlds and further define the boundary between rocky worlds like Earth and ice giants like Neptune."
Further details of Kepler's latest discovery are yet to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
