If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If your space telescope loses its ability to maneuver and point accurately, reinvent a new way to point it and kick off a novel new mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft)#Second_Light_.28K2.29

Originally shared by Ciro Villa

“NASA’s K2 mission searches for far out and wandering worlds

This week, NASA’s K2 mission, the repurposed mission of the Kepler space telescope, and other ground-based observatories have teamed up to kick-off a global experiment in exoplanet observation. Their mission: survey millions of stars toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy in search of distant stars’ planetary outposts and exoplanets wandering between the stars.

While today’s planet-hunting techniques have favored finding exoplanets near their sun, the outer regions of a planetary system have gone largely unexplored. In the exoplanet detection toolkit, scientists have a technique well suited to search these farthest outreaches and the space in between the stars. This technique is called gravitational microlensing.”

Share thanks to SETI Institute 

Image credit: NASA Ames/W. Stenzel and JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

Read more: http://buff.ly/1SE8S6w