When a planet passes in front of its parent star, as seen from our solar system, it blocks a small fraction of the light from that star; this is known as a transit. Searching for transits of distant Earths is like looking for the drop in brightness when a moth flies across a searchlight. Measuring repeated transits, all with a regular period, duration and change in brightness, provides a method for discovering planets and measuring the duration of their orbits—planets the size of Earth and smaller in the habitable zone around other stars similar to our Sun.
Kepler continuously monitored over , stars similar to our Sun for brightness changes produced by planetary transits. The Kepler Mission came to an end after four years when two of the four reaction wheels, used to point the spacecraft, ceased to function.
The Kepler Mission was reborn as the K2 Mission , which ran for an additional five years. Exoplanet Archive Kepler Resources Kepler Data Product Overview Page The Kepler project produced a wide range of data products and documentation to assist the community in using data from the mission to help study both exoplanets and other astrophsyical areas.
These data range from engineering data on the detectors to lists of planet candidates and includes many of the intermediate data products in the data processing path.
Results from this research are relevant in constraining the potential habitability of Earth-sized planets discovered by the Kepler mission. Additionally, VPL Team member Eric Agol, who is also a Kepler guest observer, discovered the most potentially habitable planet to date in the Kepler data, and continues to develop planet detection algorithms to improve the science yield from the Kepler data.
VPL Team member Lucianne Walkowicz Berkeley is also a member of the Kepler scientific analysis team and works on understanding the photometric variability and flare frequency and strength for stars that serve as planetary hosts. VPL Team member Drake Deming, with graduate student Holly Short, is developing new techniques to derive planetary atmospheric characteristics from combined Kepler data, also increasing the science yield of the mission. Data concerning Kepler and K2 discoveries is as of Nov, Kepler detects planets by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars.
Some planets pass in front of their stars as seen from our point of view on Earth; when they do, they cause their stars to dim slightly, an event Kepler can see. Kepler is designed to survey more than , stars in our galaxy to determine the number of sun-like stars that have Earth-size and larger planets.
Each rectangle indicates the specific region of the sky covered by each CCD element of the Kepler photometer. There are a total of 42 CCD elements in pairs, each pair comprising a square.
Quick Scatterometer. Airborne Snow Observatory. Skip to main content. About JPL. Engage With JPL. Kepler Exoplanet Mission Kepler Kepler was a space telescope designed to survey a portion of the Milky Way galaxy in search of exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system. Visit Mission Website. Mission Statistics. NASA announced in February that these planets were larger than Earth, with the largest ones comparable in size to Uranus and Neptune.
In , Kepler suffered at least two safe mode events. The spacecraft essentially shut down science operations as a result of a suspected anomaly. In both cases, in February and March, the Kepler project team was able to revive the vehicle relatively quickly, within two to three days.
In September, mission scientists announced the discovery of a planet, Keplerb, orbiting two stars, where we might expect a double sunset, much like the fictional planet Tatooine depicted in the film "Star Wars.
In April , the mission, closing in on its three-and-a-half-year lifetime, was formally extended through fiscal year after a review of its operations. The extended mission started Nov. By that time, Kepler had identified more than 2, planet candidates and confirmed more than planets. Given that the Milky Way has about billion stars, this would suggest at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds in our galaxy.
In November , this number was revised up to 40 billion. Given that an earlier one failed in July and that at least three such wheels were needed to accurately aim the telescope, there was anxiety that the mission might be jeopardized.
After this and another safe mode event in late May, Kepler operated in Point Rest State PRS mode — where the spacecraft used thrusters and solar pressure to control pointing — while controllers devised a way to reactivate the wheels necessary for accurate pointing of the spacecraft.
On Aug. NASA solicited proposals from the public on how to reformulate a new mission for Kepler given its obvious limitations.
During this period, in October , Kepler mission scientists announced that they had conclusively identified the first Earth-sized rocky planet, Keplerb, which circles its host star every eight-and-a-half years, making it a very hot planet. A later announcement in April confirmed the discovery of the first Earth-sized planet, Keplerf, in the habitable zone of a star.
At the end of , the Kepler team proposed a new mission, known as K2 Second Light , using the two remaining reaction wheels to investigate smaller and dimmer red dwarf stars. Mission definition of the K2 proposal continued into , with the mission being approved by NASA in May and data collection beginning May Observations continued through the year with several campaigns of data collection.
By January , Kepler had found 1, confirmed exoplanets in about star systems.
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