Astronomy: Astronomers Discover Planetary Odd Couple

Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., Since the last update the team has had two science data downlinks. The most recent one on June 27 included a quarterly roll to the summer science attitude. This successfully completed Quarter 13 of flight operations.

 Planetrise: An artist's conception shows Kepler-36c as it might look from the surface of neighboring Kepler-36b.
Image credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/David Aguilar. 

 Astronomers Discover Planetary Odd Couple

 Astronomers have discovered a pair of neighboring planets with dissimilar densities orbiting very close to each other. The planets are too close to their star to be in the so-called "habitable zone," the region in a system where liquid water might exist on the surface, but they have the closest-spaced orbits ever confirmed. The findings are published today in the journal Science.

The research team, led by Josh Carter, a Hubble fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Eric Agol, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle, used data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets.

The inner planet, Kepler-36b, orbits its host star every 13.8 days and the outer planet, Kepler-36c, every 16.2 days. On their closest approach, the neighboring duo comes within about 1.2 million miles of each other. This is only five times the Earth-moon distance and about 20 times closer to one another than any two planets in our solar system.

Kepler-36b is a rocky world measuring 1.5 times the radius and 4.5 times the mass of Earth. Kepler-36c is a gaseous giant measuring 3.7 times the radius and eight times the mass of Earth. The planetary odd couple orbits a star slightly hotter and a couple billion years older than our sun, located 1,200 light-years from Earth

To read more about the discovery, visit: the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and University of Washington press releases.

Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission's development.

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

For information about the Kepler Mission, click here.
Michele Johnson

Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-6982
michele.johnson@nasa.gov

Mission Manager Update

07.10.12

 

Since the last update the team has had two science data downlinks. The most recent one on June 27 included a quarterly roll to the summer science attitude. This successfully completed Quarter 13 of flight operations.

Kepler flight operations have continued smoothly. Recently, a change was made to the profile that the spacecraft uses to desaturate, or unwind, the momentum in the wheels. Normally, at the start and end of each quarter, all of the momentum is held in two of the four reaction wheel assemblies, causing the other two to hover at a near zero speed. Operations near zero speed have more jitter, which can be seen in the pointing performance by the very sensitive science instrument. The spacecraft engineers have come up with a clever way to change the target of the desaturation throughout the quarter to prevent operation near zero of any of the wheels and this was implemented this month.

The new release of the Science Operations Center pipeline software, SOC 8.2, successfully completed the verification and validation test phase and will be deployed to operations the first half of July 2012. As noted in a previous update, SOC 8.2 adds features to: (a) improve corrections of the systematic errors in stellar flux time series; (b) improves sensitivity to planetary systems with two transits only; and (c) improves sensitivity to small planets in multiple planet systems.

Several Kepler team members attended the 220th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Anchorage, Alaska in early June where Kepler's presence was a major part of the meeting. Two days of special sessions were focused on Kepler results - one day concentrated on exoplanets and one day on astrophysics. The Kepler team hosted its first Town Hall that was attended by over 250 meeting participants. At an AAS press conference, lead author Lars Buchhave, Kepler collaborator and an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute and the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the University of Copenhagen, presented a result that shows small planets form around stars with a wide range of heavy element content which suggests that small planets may be widespread in our galaxy. This result widens the field of possible systems that could host planets in the habitable zone. The AAS press conference can be viewed here.

During the visit to Anchorage, the team gave a public talk at the Anchorage Science Pub. More than one hundred members from the community, including local media, listened as project scientist and deputy project scientist, Nick Gautier and Steve Howell, presented the latest results from the Kepler mission. You can watch the presentations on the Anchorage Science Pub's Facebook page.

The Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC) held its fifth annual workshop, hosted by Konkoly Observatory on June 18-22, 2012, in Balatonalmádi, Hungary. One hundred twenty scientists from over 20 countries attended the event, to discuss stellar astrophysics using Kepler data. Many results were shared on the solar-like oscillations of main sequence and red giant stars in addition to the synergies with exoplanet research.

Below are a few highlights from the scientific research presented at the KASC:

• Mixed mode oscillations in red giant stars allow us to separate out the rotation rate of the stellar core and stellar envelope, giving us a detailed look at the internal structure and angular momentum evolution of these evolved stars. Glitches in the acoustic modes (called mode trappings) have been used to measure the depth of the convection zone in solar-like stars. And surprisingly, the primary star (the A component) of Trinity (HD 181068, KIC 5952403, a triply eclipsing hierarchical triple star) is the only known red giant that doesn't show solar-like oscillation. A possible explanation is the tidal interaction with the companion binary that likely suppresses these oscillations.

• Significant new results were presented in the session on RR Lyrae stars. These seemingly simple radial pulsators show a huge variety of behaviors in Kepler data, indicative of complex nonlinear dynamical systems (chaos, period doubling bifurcations, high-order resonances). Surprisingly, we learned that it only takes three pulsation modes to create complicated light variations and interactions. This has far-reaching consequences for other multi-mode pulsators, such as delta Scuti stars. The discovery of period doubling and the subsequent modeling efforts resulted in a breakthrough in the investigation of the century-old Blazhko-effect (mysterious amplitude and phase modulation) shown by 50% of RR Lyrae stars. We hope that with the help of Kepler the final explanation of one of the greatest puzzles of pulsation theory will be found in the near future.

• Frequency modulation (FM) caused by a light travel time effect in a binary system is a powerful new method for finding planetary and stellar companions around pulsating stars. Its importance lies in the fact that multimode pulsators are not suitable for transit or radial velocity search. Similarly, high-mass and rapidly rotating stars are usually not optimal for finding companions by radial velocity surveys. The purely photometric FM-method provides the mass function, the projected orbital distance and the radial velocity curve without spectroscopic observations. We heard about this new method and its applications during the conference.

• M giants represent the late evolutionary stages of sun-like stars. The timescales of their brightness variations are typically on the order of 100 days. Their pulsations are closely linked to mass-loss, a process that is still lacking a deep understanding. Careful analyses of M giant pulsations will help us pinpoint the connection between oscillations, mass-loss and evolution, which, ultimately, will deliver new insight into the future of our own sun. Current Kepler data on M giants are just beginning to scratch the surface, but we expect tremendous improvement with the data promised by the Kepler Extended Mission.

The team also welcomed two new planets to the family. A research team, led by Josh Carter, a Hubble fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Eric Agol, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle, discovered a pair of neighboring planets with dissimilar densities orbiting very close to each other. Called Kepler-36b and c, they have the closest-spaced orbits ever confirmed. You can read more about the discoveries in the science literature:

• Kepler-36: A Pair of Planets with Neighboring Orbits and Dissimilar Densities, J Carter et al

• Rapid dynamical chaos in an exoplanetary system, K Deck et al

Meanwhile, the team continues detailed planning for conducting an extended mission. As this planning continues, and will for a few more weeks, the team is preparing to accelerate the release of Kepler mission data to the public archive at the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. On July 28, the team will release Quarters 7, 8, and 9 to the public archive.
NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

ayabaca@gmail.com 

ayabaca@hotmail.com

ayabaca@yahoo.com
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Astronomy: Kepler Mission Manager Update

 Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., April was a momentous time for the mission! The team received approval for a mission extension through fiscal year 2016, based on a recommendation from NASA’s 2012 Senior Review of Astrophysics Missions. In addition to Kepler, eight other missions were approved. The 2012 NASA Senior Review report is available here.

 Title: Lonely Hot Jupiters. The illustration shows the 63 hot Jupiter systems, planetary systems with Jupiter-size planet candidates in three-day orbits, and their stars as well as approximate stellar colors. Simulated stellar disks and the silhouettes of the transiting planet candidates are all shown at the same relative scale.
Credit: Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics/J Steffen

 Title: Revised Candidates in the Habitable Zone, Muirhead et al, 2012.
Applying new stellar radii obtained through specialized analysis using the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory, researchers (Muirhead et al, 2012) have rendered three super Earth-size planet candidates in the habitable zone.
Credit: NASA Ames

April was a momentous time for the mission! The team received approval for a mission extension through fiscal year 2016, based on a recommendation from NASA’s 2012 Senior Review of Astrophysics Missions. In addition to Kepler, eight other missions were approved. The 2012 NASA Senior Review report is available here.

The extended mission will begin in October 2012. The team has been busy preparing a transition plan to carry the mission through 2016. The extended mission paradigm will be to operate with more dependence on, and service to, the astronomical community. The Kepler exoplanet survey will continue, but, to reduce mission cost, the project will support follow-up observation and analysis only of planet candidates near Earth-size and then produce a reliable catalog of the near Earth-size candidates. In addition to continuing the exoplanet survey, the level of Kepler resources devoted to astrophysical studies will be substantially increased to allow much greater community participation in Kepler science. All Kepler survey data will be available to the community for analysis with no proprietary period.

Extended mission planning and implementation are progressing. Methods and infrastructure to facilitate working groups of community scientists to participate both in the survey operation and analysis of survey results are being developed. The Kepler Guest Observer Office is preparing to support observations proposed by the community, as well as access to archival data. Extended mission follow-up observing plans and procedures will be completed in time for trial use in the summer 2012 observing season, before the first season of the extended mission in early 2013. All other preparations for extended mission operation will be in place and functioning by the beginning of October 2012.

On April 16, during the opening ceremony of the 28th National Space Symposium, the team was awarded the 2012 John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr., Award for Space Exploration. We are honored and humbled by this prestigious award AND the remarkable video the team at the Space Foundation produced.

Results continue to flow from the data. Recently, two papers of note were published:

• P. Muirhead et al, 2012 – The finding reports new stellar parameters of 84 cooler late-K and M-type stars reported in the Kepler Input Catalog. Applying the new stellar radii obtained through specialized analysis using the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory, the research team's re-evaluation has rendered three super Earth-size planet candidates in the habitable zone.
• J. Steffen et al, 2012 – In a sample study of 63 hot Jupiter systems, planetary systems with Jupiter-size planet candidates in three day orbits, researchers found no evidence of small, companion candidates. The finding suggests that small candidates were ejected from the system, leaving large planets to later circularize into tight orbits.

Meanwhile, routine spacecraft operations continued as the operations team recently downlinked the latest month of science data (the first month of Quarter 13) without issue. The operation occurred April 30, 2012, with about 17 hours interruption in science data collection.

As noted in last month’s update, the team continues to monitor increased solar activity as our sun is exhibiting an increase in solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME). Kepler now has experienced three significant CME events, starting on Day-of-Year (DOY) 23, 27, and 67. The third event was by far the largest; a very small fourth event was observed on DOY 73. The team is pleased to report the spacecraft did not experience any major anomaly. However, the CMEs did impact the quality of the science data collected during the events. The three significant events produced noticeable changes in dark current, discernible pointing excursions, and significant flux variations for all target stars. As a result, the team has chosen to disregard the data collected during these CMEs. This has resulted in data losses of roughly 2.2, 1.0, and 4.6 days, respectively, during the three events. Their long-term impact on the spacecraft and its detectors is still under investigation, but appears to be small and non-threatening to overall mission success.

Our Science Operations Center (SOC) ground system software team continues its busy pace. The SOC 8.1 software release, deployed in March 2012, continues as the baseline pipeline software system, while the team has been focused on readying the SOC 8.2 software release for operations. As noted previously, SOC 8.2 adds features to: (a) improve corrections of the systematic errors in stellar flux time series; (b) improves sensitivity to planetary systems with two transits only; and (c) improves sensitivity to small planets in multiple planet systems. We expect to deploy this capability in late June 2012.

Finally, the Kepler team marked the third anniversary since beginning science operations. On May 12, 2009, we completed the final commissioning activities for the Kepler spacecraft and entered operations. The three years have gone by quickly, and the mission has produced many exciting discoveries. With a mission extension of four years recently granted, we expect that Kepler’s best days - and discoveries, - lie ahead.

Regards,
Roger 
 NASA
 Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
 ayabaca@gmail.com
 ayabaca@hotmaial.com
 ayabaca@yahoo.com
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ASTRONOMY: Kepler Mission Description

Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., The Kepler instrument is a specially designed 0.95-meter diameter telescope called a photometer or light meter. It has a very large field of view for an astronomical telescope 105 square degrees, which is comparable to the area of your hand held at arm's length. The fields of view of most telescopes are less than one square degree. Kepler needs the large field of view in order to observe the large number of stars. It stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for at least 3.5 years, the initial length of the mission, which can be extended.

Kepler Spacecraft and Photometer(Launched on March 6, 2009)

Kepler Scientific Objectives

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:
1.- Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets that are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars
2.- Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets
3.- Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems
4.- Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets
5.- Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques
6.- Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.

Image above: Kepler's targeted star field. Credit: Carter Roberts of the Eastbay Astronomical Society

Kepler Mission Star Field
An image by Carter Roberts of the Eastbay Astronomical Society in Oakland, CA, showing the Milky Way region of the sky where the Kepler spacecraft/photometer will be pointing. 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. Credit: Carter Roberts

Kepler Mission Description
Kepler, a NASA Strategic mission launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit on March 6, 2009, is designed to stare at a 105 square degree region of the sky in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. The mission's goal is to obtain long-term, unfiltered, and precise light curves of up to 100,000 cool stars and search for periodic transits of planets as small as the Earth. A secondary objective of the mission is to study rapid oscillations of the target stars in order to determine their ages, radii, and metallic chemical compositions of planet-hosting stars. The Kepler Science page and Science Goals pages lay out the scientific objectives in some detail.
The science operations phase of the mission began on May 12, 2009. Since then Kepler has monitored the same sky field almost continuously. The principal exception is for monthly data downlinks during which the spacecraft must turn away from the monitored field, reorient toward the Earth for the downlink, and return to the field. The spacecraft also "rolls" every three months to allow for continous illumination of Kepler's solar arrays. A table of scheduled quarterly rolls, each lasting about 1 day, is given on the MAST/Kepler FAQ page (see FAQ tab in left "gutter"). The fields of view of 42 CCDs covers a four-way symmetrical pattern on the sky such that the same stars remain on the detectors during the mission. Although the Kepler field covers a large sky area containing millions of stars, data from small regions around only 150,000 targets are recorded and stored onboard the spacecraft. The default integration time is about 30 minutes, although a small number of asteroseismology and other targets of interest are recorded with integration times of about 1 minute.
The mission has a nominal lifetime of three and one half years to pursue its core science objectives. These objectives will be carried out by Science Principal Investigator William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, the Kepler Science Team, the Kepler Participating Scientists, and the Kepler Asteroseismology Science Consortium. In addition, a limited Guest Observer (GO) program, dedicated to general (non-exoplanetary) astrophysics has been established. Proposal solicitations will be made on an annual basis, resources permitting, by NASA Headquarters. The GO program is administered from NASA's Ames Research Center. Information of interest to potential GO proposers can be found at the GO program website and in NASA's omnibus annual announcement Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences 2010 NASA ROSES.
A map of where Kepler's Field of View in the sky was obtained from the Project and is shown below. Clicking on this image will bring up a magnified view. Users can reconnoiter the Kepler field in detail by going to the FFI display page.
Investigators interested in whether targets included in the MAST/Kepler ("KIC") database lie on any of the 42 Kepler detector fields should first consult the Kepler Target Search form. Users are also emphatically advised not to use solely color-derived quantities like Teff, logg, etc. to select their targets for proposals.
As the mission proceeds, the Project will periodically drop stars as exoplanetary search candidates. As it does so, MAST will provide access to lists of targets and/or data released as notifications in the Dropped Target and Published Target tabs under the Search and Retrieval item on the left banner of this page and in the Public Light Curves link in the Quick Links section above. As data become nonproprietary, the restrictions against accessing them, which are denoted by the "yellow band" on the Retrieval page, will disappear. In addition to the Dropped and Target lists, Kepler light curves and associated ground-based follow up data have been also placed on MAST's Kepler High Level Science Products site.
Image above: Kepler's targeted star field graphic. Credit: NASA

Target Field of View :
Since transits only last a fraction of a day, all the stars must be monitored continuously, that is, their brightnesses must be measured at least once every few hours. The ability to continuously view the stars being monitored dictates that the field of view (FOV) must never be blocked at any time during the year. Therefore, to avoid the Sun the FOV must be out of the ecliptic plane. The secondary requirement is that the FOV have the largest possible number of stars. This leads to the selection of a region in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations of our Galaxy as shown.

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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