Crippled
spacecraft turns up new worlds while balancing on sunlight
SECOND LIFE The revived Kepler telescope, shown in this artist’s illustration, will stare at a different patch of sky every 80 days while using sunlight to stay balanced. |
The Kepler space telescope has bagged its first confirmed planet
since being benched in the summer of 2013 by a broken part used to steady the
spacecraft.
The planet, named HIP 116454b, sits 180 light-years away in the
constellation Pisces. Kepler detected the planet, which is about 2.5 times as
wide as Earth, as a brief dip in starlight as HIP 116454b passed between its
sun and the telescope. Follow-up observations at the Telescopio Nazionale
Galileo, an Italian telescope on the Canary Islands, provided the planet’s
mass: roughly 12 times that of Earth. HIP 116454b is probably either a water
world or a mini-Neptune, astronomers report in a paper posted online December 18
and accepted to the Astrophysical Journal.
The discovery is the first for the K2 mission, Kepler’s second
chance at life. After losing two of
its reaction wheels, which balanced the spacecraft, Kepler could no longer stay
steady enough to stare at stars and detect planets. Engineers proposed pointing
Kepler’s solar panel roof toward the sun and using the balanced pressure from
sunlight to steady the spacecraft. HIP 116454b turned up in a February 2014
test run to see if the plan would work.
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