NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft which is carrying out a new mission has made its first exoplanet discovery - a 'super-Earth' located 180 light-years from Earth.

Lead researcher Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied publicly available data collected by the spacecraft during a test of the new K2 mission in February 2014.

This led to the discovery of a planet, HIP 116454b, which is 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and follows a close, nine-day orbit around a star that is smaller and cooler than our Sun, making the planet too hot for life as we know it.

HIP 116454b and its star are 180 light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Pisces.