Selecting Pixels for High-Precision Photometry in the Kepler Mission

Details Selecting Pixels for High-Precision Photometry in the Kepler Mission Selecting Pixels for High-Precision Photometry in the Kepler Mission

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21113514b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #135.14; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.974

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The Kepler Mission is designed to discover and characterize the frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars by observing 100,000 main-sequence stars in a 100 square degree field of view (FOV). Kepler's transit detection method uses a long photometric time series for each target star. Each data point is created by summing several pixels.The data are co-added and stored at a 30 minute cadence that is stored for monthly downlink. Memory and bandwidth constraints prevent the storage of all 95 million pixels in the photometer, so pixels of interest are assigned to each target. We describe the automated method by which each transit target is assigned a set of pixels that are optimal for high precision photometry. This method relies on synthetic images based on the Kepler input catalog combined with a direct measurement of the Kepler systempoint spread function. We cover the PSF measurement process, the rendering of the synthetic image, and the use of the synthetic image to determine the contribution of each pixel to a target's signal-to-noise ratio. The optimal pixels for a target are defined as those pixels which maximize that target's signal-to-noise ratio. Our method includes models of the noise associated with pixel response variations and for spacecraft motion. We describe the process that is used to identify appropriate pixels for modeling the background as well as pixel management, including the specification of pixels for non-transit targets.
Funding for this mission provided by NASA's Discovery Program Office, SMD.

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