The K2 Mission: Characterization and Early Results

By S. Howell, C. Sobeck, M. Haas, M. Still, T. Barclay, F. Mullally, J. Troeltzsch, Suzanne Aigrain, S. Bryson, Douglas A. Caldwell and 9 more. 2014

1,347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The K2 mission will make use of the Kepler spacecraft and its assets to expand upon Kepler’s groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of exoplanets and astrophysics through new and exciting observations. K2 will use an innovative way of operating the spacecraft to observe target fields along the ecliptic for the next 2–3 years. Early science commissioning observations have shown an estimated photometric precision near 400 ppm in a single 30 minute observation, and a 6-hr photometric precision of 80 ppm (both at V = 12). The K2 mission offers long-term, simultaneous optical observation of thousands of objects at a precision far better than is achievable from ground-based telescopes. Ecliptic fields will be observed for approximately 75 days enabling a unique exoplanet survey which fills the gaps in duration and sensitivity between the Kepler and TESS missions, and offers pre-launch exoplanet target identification for JWST transit spectroscopy. Astrophysics observations with K2 will include studies of young open clusters, bright stars, galaxies, supernovae, and asteroseismology.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

STELLAR AND PLANETARY PROPERTIES OF K2 CAMPAIGN 1 CANDIDATES AND VALIDATION OF 17 PLANETS, INCLUDING A PLANET RECEIVING EARTH-LIKE INSOLATION (2015, background): “K2will fulfill the promise of Kepler, with the goal of providing a yield of small planets around bright, small stars to facilitate followup measurements (Howell et al. 2014).”
A SYSTEMATIC SEARCH FOR TRANSITING PLANETS IN THE K2 DATA (2015, background): “Because of the degraded spacecraft orientation systems, the new K2 data exhibit far greater pointing variations—and substantially more pointing-induced variations in photometry— than the original Kepler Mission data.”
The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems (2014, background): “In space, the handicapped but still potent Kepler telescope has begun monitoring several star fields near the ecliptic plane, the only zone where it can achieve stable pointing (Howell et al. 2014).”
Observations of Transiting Exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) (2014, background): “From space, K2 (Howell et al. 2014) is likely to detect several hundred small planets orbiting bright stars.”
They are small worlds after all: revised properties of Kepler M dwarf stars and their planets (2015, methodology): “Failure of a second reaction wheel in May 2013 terminated the primary Kepler mission, but this was succeeded by the “K2” program of two wheel operation (Howell et al. 2014).”
White Dwarf Rotation as a Function of Mass and a Dichotomy of Mode Line Widths: Kepler Observations of 27 Pulsating DA White Dwarfs through K2 Campaign 8 (2017, background): “After the failure of its second reaction wheel, Kepler entered a new phase of observations, K2, where it observes new fields along the ecliptic every three months (Howell et al. 2014).”
Measuring the vertical age structure of the Galactic disc using asteroseismology and SAGA (2015, background): “In particular, the latest spaceborne missions such as CoRoT (Baglin & Fridlund 2006) and Kepler/K2 (Gilliland et al. 2010; Howell et al. 2014) allow us to robustly measure global oscillation frequencies in several thousands of stars, in particular red giants, which in turn make it possible to…”
PLANETARY CANDIDATES FROM THE FIRST YEAR OF THE K2 MISSION (2015, background): “In K2 operations, Kepler observes fields pointed away from the sun, along the ecliptic plane, for only about 80 days at a time before moving onto an entirely new field (Howell et al. 2014).”
Asteroseismology and Gaia: Testing Scaling Relations Using 2200 Kepler Stars with TGAS Parallaxes (2017, methodology): “Current and future opportunities to detect oscillations in distant red giants outside the Kepler field include the K2 Mission (Howell et al. 2014), targets with one-year coverage near the ecliptic poles observed by TESS (Ricker et al. 2014), red giants in the bulge observed with WFIRST (Gould et…”
EVEREST: PIXEL LEVEL DECORRELATION OF K2 LIGHT CURVES (2016, methodology): “As of May 2014 the spacecraft has been operating in this new mode, known as K2, and has continued to enable high precision photometry science, monitoring tens of thousands of stars near the plane of the ecliptic during campaigns lasting about 75 days each (Howell et al. 2014).”
CHARACTERIZING K2 PLANET DISCOVERIES: A SUPER-EARTH TRANSITING THE BRIGHT K DWARF HIP 116454 (2014, background): “The recently extended K2 mission enables renewed opportunities for transit science on a new set of bright target stars, albeit with somewhat reduced photometric precision compared to the original Kepler mission (Howell et al. 2014).”
Estimating stellar birth radii and the time evolution of Milky Way’s ISM metallicity gradient (2018, methodology): “…APOGEE, SDSS-V’s Milky Way Mapper (MWM, Kollmeier et al. 2017), WEAVE (Dalton et al. 2012), and 4MOST (de Jong et al. 2012) up to ∼ 6 − 7 kpc from the Sun, combined with Gaia astrometry and asteroseismic ages from K2 (Howell et al. 2014), TESS (Ricker et al. 2015), and PLATO (Rauer et al. 2014).”
The GALAH survey: scientific motivation (2015, background): “The CoRoT space mission (Auvergne et al. 2009) and the extended Kepler mission, K2 (Howell et al. 2014), provide key opportunities for galactic archaeology with GALAH.”
Observing the Atmospheres of Known Temperate Earth-sized Planets with JWST (2017, background): “To that end, a number of surveys have been searching for planets around these nearby stars (Nutzman & Charbonneau 2008; Jehin et al. 2011; Howell et al. 2014; Ricker et al. 2014), and to date, nine Earth-sized planets have been detected that are amenable to atmospheric characterization.”
The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars (2016, methodology): “…(RV) methods, transit detection missions such as NASA’s Kepler mission (Borucki et al., 2006) and the K2 mission—an ecliptic plane survey that re-purposes the Kepler spacecraft following the loss of two of its reaction wheels (Howell et al., 2014)—and gravitational microlensing (Gaudi, 2012).”
One of the closest exoplanet pairs to the 3:2 mean motion resonance: K2-19b and c (2015, methodology): “The K2 mission (Howell et al. 2014) is the survey now being conducted with the repurposed Kepler space telescope, and became fully operational in June 2014.”