The Status of Kepler's Search for Earth-size Planets

Details The Status of Kepler's Search for Earth-size Planets The Status of Kepler's Search for Earth-size Planets

May 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21811201b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #112.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Computer Science

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NASA's Kepler Mission uses transit photometry to determine the frequency of earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. The photometer is a 0.95-m effective aperture, wide field of view Schmidt camera in an Earth-trailing orbit that monitors over 150,000 stars brighter than 16th magnitude in a 115 square degree field of view. The mission has had two major public data releases, providing the astronomical community with four months of nearly continuous, high-precision photometry of all stars targeted as part of the Kepler planet search. A catalog of approximately 1,000 stars with transiting planet candidates -- more than 70% of which are smaller than Neptune -- accompanied the data release (Borucki et al. 2011). As Kepler collects more data, it gains sensitivity to smaller planets at longer orbital periods. This is reflected in the catalog as it contains sizable numbers of candidates that are earth-sized as well as sizable numbers of candidates in the habitable zone. Multiple transit systems are abundant in the released data. Dynamical studies suggest that the false-positive rate for these systems will be smaller than for the general sample. Moreover, the potential for determining planet masses via transit timing variations hold much promise for confirming the smaller planet candidates. Ground-based follow-up observations, transit timing observations, and blend analyses to rule out false positives have all played a major role in establishing the planet interpretation, leading to major mission milestones such as the discovery of Kepler's first rocky planet, Kepler-10b, and the discovery of six transiting planets orbiting the same star, Kepler-11. We present an overview of the status of the mission -- its health, performance, discoveries to date, our progress in determining the frequencies of planets, and our strategies moving forward.
Funding for this mission is provided by the NASA Science Mission Directorate.

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