May 15, 2015
It was nearly a year ago that the Kepler spacecraft made a comeback after a technical setback: the loss of its ultra precise pointing capability. Revived as the K2 mission, now in its fifth observing campaign, the spacecraft continues to operate beautifully.
K2 began Campaign 5 on April 26. The observation targets include more than 25,000 stars, which can be searched for exoplanets and examined for a variety of astrophysical phenomena. The field of study also includes M67, an open cluster home to thousands of stars younger than our sun and 2002 YH140, a dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune. The field is in the direction of the constellation Cancer.
Data collected for Campaigns 0, 1 and 2 have been made available to the public through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Campaign 3 data are scheduled for delivery to MAST in June 2015 and Campaign 4 data will be processed with a delivery to MAST planned for August 2015.
During Campaign 3, observations of Neptune and two of its moons were conducted. Lead researcher, Jason Rowe, SETI Institute Kepler scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, stitched together more than 100,000 images to generate a movie of the Neptunian system. The movie illustrates 70 days of uninterrupted observation making this one of the longest continuous studies of an outer solar system object.
Last week, the team hosted a workshop for the microlensing science community to discuss observing strategies for K2's Campaign 9. Planned for April 2016, Campaign 9 will be the first time that a NASA spacecraft will undertake a large-area microlensing survey. Microlensing is a technique that can be used to detect long-orbital period planets, equivalent to our solar system planets like Jupiter and further out Neptune, around distant stars.
This K2 microlensing campaign will provide a unique opportunity to test an observing strategy and will contribute to NASA's ongoing study of a possible future Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission, notionally planned to launch in the following decade. The K2 microlensing campaign will:
1. Facilitate community-based microlensing science
2. Enable development of tools for analyzing survey data
3. Inform planning for the execution of a WFIRST microlensing survey
To learn more about the K2 mission visit the Kepler Science Center website.Tuesday, the Kepler spacecraft marked six years since it began its staring contest with the stars in search of other worlds. Lucky for us, the stars blinked first and often. So often in fact, that today we know of thousands of planets orbiting other stars than that of our backyard sun. Eight of these worlds may in some way be like Earth! For a look at more of the spacecraft's story, check out Kepler's Six Years in Science (and Counting) infographic. For the latest Kepler exoplanet and candidate statistics, visit the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
Last week at a ceremony in San Jose, California, the Silicon Valley Business Journal honored Kepler mission co-investigator, Edna DeVore, in their 2015 Women of Influence. DeVore, director of education and outreach and acting CEO of the SETI Institute, has been a longtime member of the Kepler team responsible for establishing the mission's education and public outreach plan. As an astronomy educator since 1972, DeVore's leadership and teaching acumen has resulted in the development of planetarium programs, curricula for elementary, middle and high school students, and educational information that has reached teachers and students across the US and abroad. The Kepler and K2 education program materials can be found online.
The following are highlights of recent research using Keplerand K2 data that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal:
• The Five Planets In The Kepler-296 Binary System All Orbit The Primary: A Statistical And Analytical Analysis (Barclay et al, 2015) – Kepler-296 is a binary star system with five small transiting exoplanets. This paper demonstrates that the planets all orbit the brighter star in the binary through follow-up observations and statistical modeling. This new analysis shows that two of these planets are smaller than twice the size of Earth and fall into the star's habitable zone.
• Eccentricity from transit photometry: small planets in Kepler multi-planet systems have low eccentricities (Van Eylen et al, 2015) – Researchers based at Aarhus University in Denmark measured the orbital eccentricity of 74 small exoplanets and found their orbits to be close to circular, similar to the planets in the solar system, but in contrast to previous measurements of more massive exoplanets where highly eccentric orbits are commonly found. These findings have important implications for planet formation theory, as well as planet occurrence rates and habitability.
• Pushing the limits: K2 observations of the trans-Neptunian objects 2002 GV31 and (278361) 2007 JJ43 (Pál et al, 2015) – The paper reports on the observations of two faint outer solar system objects, highlighting the unique capability of the K2 Mission to provide unbiased rotational, shape and albedo characteristics of TNOs.