Overview:

The Kepler Mission is a space photometer being developed by NASA. It will be the first instrument capable of finding Earth-size and smaller extrasolar planets using Ball Aerospaces's Kepler Space Observatory satellite. It will observe the brightness of about 100,000 stars over four years to detect periodical transits of a star by its planets.

Objectives:

• Determine how many terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars.

• Determine the range of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets.

• Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems.

• Determine the range of orbit size, brightness, size, mass and density of short-period giant planets.

• Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques.

• Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.

Instrumentation:

The Kepler photometer basically consists of a Schmidt telescope with a 0.95-meter aperture. The photometer itself is composed of an array of 42 CCDs. Each 50x25 mm CCD has 2200x1024 pixels. Only the information from the CCD pixels where there stars brighter than m_v= 14 is recorded. The Instrument has the sensitivity to detect an Earth-size transit of an solar-like star at 4 sigma in 6.5 hours of integration.