Kepler: NASA's First Mission Capable of Finding Earth-Size Planets

Kepler, a NASA Discovery mission, is a spaceborne telescope designed to search a nearby region of our galaxy for Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zone of stars like our sun. The habitable zone is that region around a start where the temperature permits water to be liquid on the surface of a planet. Liquid water is considered essential forth existence of life. Mission Phases: Six mission phases have been defined to describe the different periods of activity during Kepler's mission. These are: launch; commissioning; early science operations, science operations: and decommissionin

Second Workshop on Improvements to Photometry

The papers in these proceedings show that a major effort is under way to improve all aspects of photometry. Astronomical multichannel photometry, photodiodes, analog-to-digital converters, data reduction techniques, interference filters and optical fibers are discussed

Astrophysical science with a spaceborne photometric telescope

The FRESIP Project (FRequency of Earth-Sized Inner Planets) is currently under study at NASA Ames Research Center. The goal of FRESIP is the measurement of the frequency of Earth-sized extra-solar planets in inner orbits via the photometric signature of a transit event. This will be accomplished with a spaceborne telescope/photometer capable of photometric precision of two parts in 100,000 at a magnitude of m(sub v) = 12.5. To achieve the maximum scientific value from the FRESIP mission, an astrophysical science workshop was held at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, November 11-12, 1993. Workshop participants were invited as experts in their field of astrophysical research and discussed the astrophysical science that can be achieved within the context of the FRESIP mission

Tests of a multichannel photometer based on silicon diode detectors

A breadboard photometer was constructed that demonstrates a precision of 2 times 10 to the 4th power in the laboratory and scintillation-limited performance when used with an 0.5 m aperture telescope. Because the detectors and preamps are not cooled, only stars with m sub v approx. less than 4 are bright enough to allow the photometer to attain a precision of 1 times 10 to the 3rd power for three minute observations with an 0.5 m aperature telescope. Cooling the telescope should allow much fainter stars to be observed. Increasing the aperture of the telescope will allow higher precision and the observation of fainter stars

Kepler-62: A Five-Planet System with Planets of 1.4 and 1.6 Earth Radii in the Habitable Zone

We present the detection of five planets—Kepler-62b, c, d, e, and f—of size 1.31, 0.54, 1.95, 1.61 and 1.41 Earth radii (R_⊕), orbiting a K2V star at periods of 5.7, 12.4, 18.2, 122.4, and 267.3 days, respectively. The outermost planets, Kepler-62e and -62f, are super–Earth-size (1.25 R_⊕ < planet radius ≤ 2.0 R_⊕) planets in the habitable zone of their host star, respectively receiving 1.2 ± 0.2 times and 0.41 ± 0.05 times the solar flux at Earth’s orbit. Theoretical models of Kepler-62e and -62f for a stellar age of ~7 billion years suggest that both planets could be solid, either with a rocky composition or composed of mostly solid water in their bulk

SOME TESTS TO ESTABLISH CONFIDENCE IN PLANETS DISCOVERED BY TRANSIT PHOTOMETRY

Increased attention is being paid to transit photometry as a viable method for discovering or confirming detections of extrasolar planets. Several ground-based efforts are underway that target short-period, giant planets such as 51 Peg b, and several missions have been proposed to NASA and ESA to detect planets as small as Earth from spaceborne photometers. The success of these efforts depends in part on the ability to establish appropriate detection thresholds to control false alarm rates and the ability to assess the statistical confidence in planetary candidates drawn from any such search. This latter function attains higher importance for the space-based efforts, where direct ground-based confirmation of terrestrial-size planets is not possible. These tasks are complicated by the need to survey tens of thousands of stars to overcome the limited geometric probability of transit alignment and by the nature of the transit signals themselves. In this paper, we present empirical methods for setting appropriate detection thresholds and for establishing the confidence level in planetary candidates obtained from transit photometry of even a large number of stars. The methods are simple and allow the observer to quickly assess the statistical significance of any particular set of transits

Characteristics of Kepler Planetary Candidates Based on the First Data Set

In the spring of 2009, the Kepler Mission commenced high-precision photometry on nearly 156,000 stars to determine the frequency and characteristics of small exoplanets, conduct a guest observer program, and obtain asteroseismic data on a wide variety of stars. On 2010 June 15, the Kepler Mission released most of the data from the first quarter of observations. At the time of this data release, 705 stars from this first data set have exoplanet candidates with sizes from as small as that of Earth to larger than that of Jupiter. Here we give the identity and characteristics of 305 released stars with planetary candidates. Data for the remaining 400 stars with planetary candidates will be released in 2011 February. More than half the candidates on the released list have radii less than half that of Jupiter. Five candidates are present in and near the habitable zone; two near super-Earth size, and three bracketing the size of Jupiter. The released stars also include five possible multi-planet systems. One of these has two Neptune-size (2.3 and 2.5 Earth radius) candidates with near-resonant periods

Transit Timing Observations from Kepler: VI. Potentially interesting candidate systems from Fourier-based statistical tests

We analyze the deviations of transit times from a linear ephemeris for the Kepler Objects of Interest (KOI) through Quarter six (Q6) of science data. We conduct two statistical tests for all KOIs and a related statistical test for all pairs of KOIs in multi-transiting systems. These tests identify several systems which show potentially interesting transit timing variations (TTVs). Strong TTV systems have been valuable for the confirmation of planets and their mass measurements. Many of the systems identified in this study should prove fruitful for detailed TTV studies.Comment: 32 pages, 6 of text and one long table, Accepted to Ap