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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Despite mechanical failures, the Kepler space observatory continues to find exoplanets [nature.com] in its extended K2 mission phase:

Between 2009 and 2013, Kepler became the most successful planet-hunting machine ever, discovering at least 1,030 planets and more than 4,600 possible others in a single patch of sky. When a mechanical failure stripped the spacecraft of its ability to point precisely among the stars, engineers reinvented it in 2014 as the K2 mission [nature.com], which looks at different parts of the cosmos for shorter periods of time.

In its first year of observing, K2 has netted more than 100 confirmed exoplanets, says astronomer Ian Crossfield at the University of Arizona in Tucson. They include a surprising number of systems in which more than one planet orbits the same star1. The K2 planets are also orbiting hotter stars than are many of the Kepler discoveries.

[...] The original Kepler mission was designed to answer a specific question: what fraction of Sun-like stars have Earth-size planets around them? Unbound by those constraints — even if not as good at pointing itself — K2 has been able to explore wider questions of planetary origin and evolution. "Now we get to look at a much bigger variety," says Steve Howell, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

And because K2 looks at stars that are generally brighter and closer to Earth than Kepler did, the exoplanets that the mission finds are likely to be the best studied for the foreseeable future. This is because they are near enough to allow astronomers to explore them with other telescopes on Earth and in space.

Ten Multi-planet Systems from K2 Campaigns 1 & 2 and the Masses of Two Hot Super-Earths [arxiv.org]

Kepler & K2 Science Center [nasa.gov]

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