Kepler
Full Name: Kepler
Phase: Operating
Launch Date: March 06, 2009
Mission Project Home Page: http://kepler.nasa.gov/
Program(s): Discovery, Exoplanet Exploration
The Kepler Mission, a NASA Discovery mission, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to detect and characterize hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or nearby the habitable zone. The habitable zone encompasses the distances from a start where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface.
The scientific objective of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems. This is achieved by surveying a large sample of stars to:
- Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets that are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars
- Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets
- Estimate how many planets there are in the multiple-star systems
- Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets
- Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques
- Determine the properties of those starts that harbor planetary systems
Based on the mission described above, including conservative assumptions about detection criteria, stellar variability, taking into account only orbits with 4 transits in 3.5 years, etc…, and assuming that planets are common around other starts like our Sun, then we expect to detect:
From transits of terrestrial planets in one year orbits:
- About 50 planets, if most are the same size as Earth (R~1.0 Re) and none larger
- About 185 planets, if most have a size of R~1.3 Re
- About 640 planets, if most have the size of R~2.2 Re
- About 12% with two or more planets per system