Sun's stroke keeps Kepler online

摘要

The crippled Kepler space telescope is unexpectedly enjoying a second lease of life. The exoplanet-hunting probe will now cast its gaze on star clusters, the centre of the Milky Way and the Solar System's outer planets as it scans a ribbon of the cosmos for the next three years. This month it has been gazing at gas clouds shrouding infant stars in the constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus. The telescope, originally designed to look for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in our region of the Galaxy, has just yielded the first data set since its reincarnation after mechanical failures. Its science team is still busy analysing data from the initial planet-hunting mission, so Kepler's managers at NASA have left it to the wider astronomical community to choose specific targets for a second mission, known as K2, and to comb through the output.