Kepler, U.S. satellite designed to detect extrasolar planets by watching—from orbit around the Sun—for a slight dimming during transits as these bodies pass in front of their stars. An important objective of Kepler’s mission was to determine the percentage of planets that are in or near their stars’ habitable zones—that is, the distances from the stars at which liquid water, and therefore possibly life, could exist.
Detecting the transit of an extrasolar planet is very challenging. For example, the diameter of Earth is only 1/109 that of the Sun, so that, for an outside observer of the solar system, the passage of Earth would dim the output of the Sun by only 0.008 percent. In addition, a planet’s orbital plane must be aligned to pass in front of the star. Continuous observation without atmospheric distortion or day-night cycles—not possible from Earth—is essential to the mission. Kepler was placed in a heliocentric orbit with a 372.5-day period so it gradually trails Earth, thus avoiding effects from the magnetosphere that might interfere with the mission.
Operations started about a month after Kepler’s March 6, 2009, launch. One of the four reaction wheels used to point the spacecraft failed in 2012, but the other three were able to keep Kepler observing its field of view. Data collection ended in May 2013 when another wheel failed. However, scientists devised a new observing strategy to combine the remaining two reaction wheels with the solar radiation pressure on Kepler’s solar panels to keep the spacecraft pointed at the same spot of sky for 83 days at a time. After 83 days, sunlight would enter the telescope, and the satellite would then be turned to another patch of sky. The K2 mission, which used this strategy, began in May 2014.
The spacecraft carries a single 95-cm (37-inch) telescope that stares at the same patch of sky (105 square degrees). The original selected region was in the constellation Cygnus, which was out of the plane of the solar system to avoid fogging by light scattered by interplanetary dust or reflected by asteroids. Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) operate as light sensors rather than as imagers in order to capture small changes in star brightness during the mission. The scene is off focus so that each star covers several pixels; if the stars were not defocused, pixels in the CCDs would become saturated and reduce the precision of the observations. Stars fainter than visual magnitude 14 are rejected, but this leaves more than 100,000 stars in the field of view. For a star with an Earth-like planet, scientists estimated that the probability of Kepler’s observing that planet eclipsing its star was about 0.47 percent.
As of 2016, Kepler had discovered 2,326 extrasolar planets, about two-thirds of all planets then known. One of these, Kepler-22b, has a radius 2.4 times that of Earth and was the first planet found within the habitable zone of a star like the Sun. Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f were the first Earth-size planets to be found (their radii are 0.87 and 1.03 times the radius of Earth, respectively). Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c were the first two planets observed transiting the same star. Kepler-186f was the first Earth-size planet found within the habitable zone of its star. Kepler has discovered 20 other planets that are roughly Earth-sized within their stars’ habitable zones.