After the failure of the second reaction wheel, the otherwise healthy Kepler space telescope needed a new mission. It
turned out that the ecliptic plane is favorable to continue high-precision photometric observations. Hence, in
addition to exoplanets and stellar astrophysics, a new research topic, namely our own Solar System became available
for the venerable NASA telescope. In this talk I will describe this third pillar of K2 science and will emphasize the
role of Hungarian colleagues in this endeavour.
After a general introduction to the K2 Mission, I will discuss the conception of the idea of the K2 Solar System
Survey, during which we gathered data on main-belt asteroids, dwarf planets, trans-neptunian objects, satellites of
gas giants, as well as comets. So far we have published six peer-reviewed papers, and many more are in the pipeline. I
will describe the novelty and the challenges of the survey, touch upon a small subset of the achievements, while a
deeper discussion of technical aspects and the results and their implications are postponed to forthcoming seminar
talks.
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