The Kepler planet-hunting probe is one of NASA's great successes, with over 4,000 planet candidates in the pipeline and another thousand confirmed sightings. It's not an exaggeration to say that it has changed the way we view the Universe, giving us a much better grip on what's out there. But the telescope was let down by some of the probe's on-board hardware. After two failures in the devices that help keep the telescope pointing in the right direction, it was no longer possible to continue its original observations.
But the clever folks at NASA were able to figure out a way to use its solar panels as a pointing device, allowing the device to observe four different areas of the sky for three months apiece. A brief test run confirmed that the approach would work, and observations have started.
Today, NASA announced that the test run was sufficient for Kepler to have spotted yet another planet. A graduate student, Andrew Vanderburg, has been working on correcting the data obtained in this new observation mode prior to analysis. In an recent document that describes this work, Vanderburg notes that the new pointing isn't as precise, which leads to a four-fold degradation in quality. Using data from the test run, he has managed to cut that loss of quality in half, and he then released all the data taken during this period.
That was enough for someone to spot hints of a planet, HIP 116454b, which was then confirmed using the HARPS instrument attached to an Earth-bound telescope. HIP 116454b orbits with a nine-day period and is about 2.5 times the size of Earth. It's about 180 light years away.
The discovery certainly validates the expense of extending Kepler's mission after the failure of its pointing devices. For more details, you can read NASA's announcement. If you'd like to look at Vanderburg's data from the test run, he has placed it online.
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