KEPLER MISSION DESIGN, REALIZED PHOTOMETRIC PERFORMANCE, AND EARLY SCIENCE

By D. Koch, William J. Borucki, G. Basri, N. Batalha, T. Brown, Douglas A. Caldwell, J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, W. Cochran, E. Devore, E. Dunham and 37 more. 2010

877 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Kepler Mission, launched on 2009 March 6, was designed with the explicit capability to detect Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars using the transit photometry method. Results from just 43 days of data along with ground-based follow-up observations have identified five new transiting planets with measurements of their masses, radii, and orbital periods. Many aspects of stellar astrophysics also benefit from the unique, precise, extended, and nearly continuous data set for a large number and variety of stars. Early results for classical variables and eclipsing stars show great promise. To fully understand the methodology, processes, and eventually the results from the mission, we present the underlying rationale that ultimately led to the flight and ground system designs used to achieve the exquisite photometric performance. As an example of the initial photometric results, we present variability measurements that can be used to distinguish dwarf stars from red giants.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a6f2f9b2ce37e328cb54e2da618ca9ba165c35e0

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Citations in the corpus

The FIP and Inverse FIP Effects in Solar and Stellar Coronae (2015, background): “Further knowledge of asteroseismology and associated wave physics may be expected to come from the Kepler mission (Koch et al., 2010).”
ARCHITECTURE AND DYNAMICS OF KEPLER'S CANDIDATE MULTIPLE TRANSITING PLANET SYSTEMS (2011, background): “Kepler is a 0.95 m aperture space telescope that uses transit photometry to determine the frequency and characteristics of planets and planetary systems (Borucki et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2010; Jenkins et al. 2010; Caldwell et al. 2010).”
The Derivation, Properties, and Value of Kepler’s Combined Differential Photometric Precision (2012, background): “The Kepler Mission is a NASA Discovery mission designed to detect transiting extrasolar planets, performing nearcontinuous photometric observations of >160; 000 carefully selected target stars in Kepler’s 115 deg2 field of view, as reviewed in (Borucki et al. 2010) and (Koch et al. 2010).”
PLANET OCCURRENCE WITHIN 0.25 AU OF SOLAR-TYPE STARS FROM KEPLER (2011, background): “…in Borucki et al. (2011b) are formally “planet candidates,” absent planet validation (Torres et al. 2011), or mass determination (Borucki et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2010b; Dunham et al. 2010; Latham et al. 2010; Jenkins et al. 2010a; Holman et al. 2010; Batalha et al. 2011; Lissauer et al. 2011a).”
Rotation and magnetism of Kepler pulsating solar-like stars : Towards asteroseismically calibrated age-rotation relations (2014, background): “High-quality photometric time series obtained by the Kepler mission (Borucki et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2010) can be used to study the surface rotation and magnetic activity of solar-like stars in which eigenmodes are measured.”
Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets - III. Additional planets and stellar models (2010, background): “TrES-2 is in the field of view of the NASAKepler satellite (Koch et al. 2010), so a light curve of remarkable quality should become available for future investigations of these possibilities.”
WHITE-LIGHT FLARES ON COOL STARS IN THE KEPLER QUARTER 1 DATA (2010, methodology): “In this paper, we investigate flares found from observations of stars by the Kepler mission (Koch et al. 2010).”
MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): PLANETS, OSCILLATIONS, ROTATION, AND MASSIVE STARS (2013, background): “Advances in optical detector technology, computer processing power, and data storage capability have enabled new sky surveys (e.g., the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; York et al. 2000); triggered many new optical transient surveys, such as the Palomar Transient Factory (Law et al. 2009) and Pan-STARRS1 (”
OVERVIEW OF THE KEPLER SCIENCE PROCESSING PIPELINE (2010, neutral): “The Kepler Mission seeks to detect Earth-like planets transiting solar-like stars by performing photometric observations of ∼156,000 carefully selected target stars in Kepler’s 115 deg2 field of view (FOV), as reviewed in Borucki et al. (2010) and Koch et al. (2010).”
The Kepler characterization of the variability among A- and F-type stars I. General overview (2011, background): “The Keplerdata The NASA space missionKeplerwas launched in March 2009 and is designed to search for Earth-size planets in the extended solar neighbourhood (Borucki et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2010).”
HYDROGEN GREENHOUSE PLANETS BEYOND THE HABITABLE ZONE (2011, background): “The Kepler mission can detect Earth-size planets in the HZ of solar- type stars (Koch et al. 2010; Borucki et al. 2011) but these cannot be confirmed by Doppler.”
KEPLER ECLIPSING BINARY STARS. VII. THE CATALOG OF ECLIPSING BINARIES FOUND IN THE ENTIRE KEPLER DATA SET (2015, background): “The details and characteristics of the Kepler instrument and observing program can be found in Batalha et al. (2010), Borucki et al. (2011), Caldwell et al. (2010), Koch et al. (2010).”
The connection between stellar granulation and oscillation as seen by the Kepler mission (2014, background): “Thanks to the high precision photometric measurements of CoRoT (Baglin et al. 2006) and Kepler (Borucki et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2010) such brightness fluctuations are subject to continuous long-term monitoring for a wids variety of stars.”
ASTEROSEISMIC CLASSIFICATION OF STELLAR POPULATIONS AMONG 13,000 RED GIANTS OBSERVED BY KEPLER (2013, background): “INTRODUCTION We have seen dramatic progress in the asteroseismology of red giant stars in recent years, driven by the quantum leap in data quality and quantity arising from the space missions CoRoT (Baglin et al. 2006) andKepler (Koch et al. 2010; Gilliland et al. 2010).”
THE APOGEE RED-CLUMP CATALOG: PRECISE DISTANCES, VELOCITIES, AND HIGH-RESOLUTION ELEMENTAL ABUNDANCES OVER A LARGE AREA OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK (2014, background): “…could be different if the sample of APOKASC stars with evolutionary-state measurements does not accurately represent the parent APOKASC sample, or if the APOKASC sample does not reflect the RC and RGB populations in the Kepler field (Koch et al. 2010) or in other parts of the Galaxy41.”
Probing the core structure and evolution of red giants using gravity-dominated mixed modes observed with Kepler (2012, background): “The NASA Kepler mission provides us with thousands of high-precision photometric light curves of red giant stars (Borucki et al. 2010; Gilliland et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2010).”
ROTATION PERIODS OF 34,030 KEPLER MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS: THE FULL AUTOCORRELATION SAMPLE (2014, methodology): “Data from the Kepler space mission (Borucki et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2010) are revolutionizing the study of stellar rotation, providing 4 yrs of almost uninterrupted photometry with an unprecedented level of precision and time sampling, for a very large sample of stars.”