HIP 116454b isn’t a very exciting name for a planet and, all things considered, it doesn’t appear to be a very exciting planet. The new planet, discovered by NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft is 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and orbits its star every nine days. It is located 180 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces and is much too hot to support life, as we know it.

The exciting thing about the announcement is that Kepler is doing anything at all. Kepler was originally launched in March, 2009 to look for Earth like planets. In May 2013 the mission ground to a halt because to of four reaction wheels on the spacecraft failed.

Because Kepler uses brief flickers in the light of stars to detect the passage of planets. The smaller, and more Earth-like, the planet the the weaker the flicker in the star light. Because of this, it is crucial that the spacecraft remain absolutely stable and precise.

Some at NASA wanted to give up on the mission, but a team of scientists and engineers came up with a plan B. The team used pressure from sunlight to create a “virtual reaction wheel” to help stabilize the craft so that it could continue its mission. The new mission, dubbed K2, allowed it to continue the search for Earth-like planets and expand that mission to include closer looks at bright, nearby stars that harbor planets and observations of star clusters, supernovae and active galaxies.

“Last summer, the possibility of a scientifically productive mission for Kepler after its reaction wheel failure in its extended mission was not part of the conversation. Today, thanks to an innovative idea and lots of hard work by the NASA and Ball Aerospace team, Kepler may well deliver the first candidates for follow-up study by the James Webb Space Telescope to characterize the atmospheres of distant worlds and search for signatures of life,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s astrophysics division director at the agency’s headquarters in Washington in a statement.

The new discovery puts Kepler firmly back in the game. The find brings the total number of exoplanets found by Kepler to 996 along with 4,183 planet candidates and 2,165 eclipsing binary stars.

“The Kepler mission showed us that planets larger in size than Earth and smaller than Neptune are common in the galaxy, yet they are absent in our solar system. K2 is uniquely positioned to dramatically refine our understanding of these alien worlds and further define the boundary between rocky worlds like Earth and ice giants like Neptune,” said Steve Howell, Kepler/K2 project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

The lead researcher behind the discovery is Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Volderburg studied data collected by the spacecraft during a February 2014 test of K2. The find was confirmed by measurements from the HARPS-North spectrograph of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands.

Additional details on HIP 116454b can be found in a paper which has been accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal. Additional information about and regular updates on the Kepler mission can be found at NASA’s Kepler website.