Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2016

PLANETOLOGY aspect: the targets are in fact closer to the ce- lestial equator than they were when the in- strument was pointed at the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, and thus observations for the verification and confirmation of exoplanets can now be made with large ground-based telescopes located in both hemispheres. With these assumptions, the K2 mission look- ed immediately promising and the results were not slow in coming. One example is the discovery and validation of more than 100 exoplanets reported by a large group of re- searchers led by Ian Crossfield, of the Univer- sity of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Labo- ratory, and published in July in The Astro- physical Journal Supplement Series . The study concerned a sample of 197 exo- planet candidates, discovered during the first five observational campaigns (each of about 80 days) between 2014 and 2015, and T he diagram below sum- marizes the K2 mission strat- egy and the so- lution adopted to overcome the faulty gyro- scopes issue. [NASA Ames/ W. Stenzel]