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The injured planet-hunter, Kepler, was left crippled in space last year after Nasa said it had given up attempts to fix the telescope.

But all was not lost. Rather than abandoning the spacecraft, a team of Kepler engineers thought up an ingenious way to keep it running using the subtle pressure of sunlight.

And now, their efforts have paid off, with Kepler spotting its first alien world since being wounded by the loss of two of its gyroscope-like wheels in May 2013.

This artist's portrays the first planet discovered by the Kepler spacecraft during its K2 mission. Located 180 light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Pisces, the planet is too hot for life as we know it

The planet, dubbed HIP 116454b, is 2 and a half times the diameter of Earth and follows a close, nine-day orbit around a star that is smaller and cooler than our sun.

Located 180 light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Pisces, the planet is too hot for life as we know it. However, it is close enough to be studied by instruments, scientists claim.

'Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Kepler has been reborn and is continuing to make discoveries,' study lead author Andrew Vanderburg, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement.

'Even better, the planet it found is ripe for follow-up studies.'

The artistic concept shows Kepler operating in a new mission profile called K2. Using publicly available data, astronomers have confirmed K2's first exoplanet discovery proving Kepler can still find planets

The spacecraft, which cost £395 million, was launched in March 2009 with the chief aim of searching for Earth-sized planets that might support life.

Kepler's onboard camera detects planets by looking for transits - when a distant star dims slightly as a planet crosses in front of it.

The smaller the planet, the weaker the dimming, so brightness measurements must be exquisitely precise. To enable that precision, the spacecraft must maintain steady pointing.

In May, data collection during Kepler's extended prime mission came to an end with the failure of the second of four reaction wheels, which are used to stabilise the spacecraft.

Rather than giving up on the stalwart spacecraft, a team of scientists and engineers crafted a strategy to use pressure from sunlight as a 'virtual reaction wheel' to help control the spacecraft.

The resulting K2 mission promises to not only continue Kepler's planet hunt, but also to expand the search to bright nearby stars that harbour planets that can be studied in detail and better understand their composition.

K2 also will introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, active galaxies and supernovae.

The Kepler probe was launched in 2009. Since the K2 mission officially began in May, it has observed more than 35,000 stars and collected data on star clusters and dense star-forming regions

Small planets like HIP 116454b, orbiting nearby bright stars, are a scientific sweet spot for K2 as they are good prospects for follow-up ground studies to obtain mass measurements.

Using K2's size measurements and ground-based mass measurements, astronomers can calculate the density of a planet to determine whether it is likely a rocky, watery or gaseous world.

'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,' said Steve Howell, Kepler/K2 project scientist.

'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.'

Since the K2 mission officially began in May, it has observed more than 35,000 stars and collected data on star clusters, dense star-forming regions, and several planetary objects within our own solar system. It is currently in its third campaign.

The Kepler probe has found hundreds of new planets. Several of these worlds are 'super-Earths' with up to 10 times the Earth's mass situated in 'habitable zone' orbits where conditions may be suitable for life