Washington: 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.