First Kepler Spacecraft images
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Kepler ejects its dust cover
Kepler ejects its dust cover
The Kepler spacecraft is in the initial stages of its mission to examine our region of the Milky Way in order to discover potentially habitable, Earth-like planets.
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This artist’s animation illustrates how the dust cover on NASA’s Kepler telescope was ejected. Engineers sent a command up to the space telescope to pass an electrical current through a “burn wire” on April 7, 2009. The cover, an oval measuring 1.7 meters by 1.3 meters (67 inches by 52 inches), ejected as it was designed to do, uncovering the photometer, photometer, which is the largest camera ever flown in space. It has 42 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that will “detect slight dips in starlight, which occur when planets passing in front of their stars partially block the light from Kepler’s view.”
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Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
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*All information and images courtesy of NASA. Follow links to full captions and multimedia pages on the official Kepler mission Web site.
Where Kepler is looking
Where Kepler is looking
This star chart illustrates the large patch of sky that NASA’s Kepler mission will stare at for the duration of its three-and-a-half-year lifetime. The planet hunter’s full field of view occupies 100 square degrees of our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.
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Kepler’s focal plane, or the area where starlight is focused, is depicted on the star chart as a series of 42 vertical and horizontal rectangles. These rectangles represent the 95-megapixel camera’s 42 charge-coupled devices, or CCDs. Scientists selected the orientation of the focal plane’s field of view to avoid the region’s brightest stars, which are shown as the largest black dots. Some of these bright stars can be seen falling in between the CCD modules, in areas that are not imaged. This was done so that the brightest stars will not saturate large portions of the detectors. Saturation causes signals from the bright stars to spill, or “bloom,” into nearby planet-hunting territory.
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Image credit: Software Bisque
Kepler's full field of view
Kepler's full field of view
This image from NASA’s Kepler mission shows the telescope’s full field of view — an expansive star-rich patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra stretching across 100 square degrees, or the equivalent of two side-by-side dips of the Big Dipper.nn
A cluster of stars, called NGC 6791, and a star with a known planet, called TrES-2, are outlined. The cluster is eight billion years old, and located 13,000 light-years from Earth. It is called an open cluster because its stars are loosely bound and have started to spread out. TrES-2 is a hot Jupiter-like planet known to cross in front of, or transit, its star every 2.5 days. Kepler will hunt for transiting planets that are as small as Earth.
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Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Star clusters in Kepler's view
Star clusters in Kepler's view
This image zooms into a small portion of Kepler’s full field of view — an expansive, 100-square-degree patch of sky in our Milky Way galaxy. An eight-billion-year-old cluster of stars 13,000 light-years from Earth, called NGC 6791, can be seen in the image. Clusters are families of stars that form together out of the same gas cloud. This particular cluster is called an open cluster, because the stars are loosely bound and have started to spread out from each other.nn
The area pictured is 0.2 percent of Kepler’s full field of view, and shows hundreds of stars in the constellation Lyra. The image has been color-coded so that brighter stars appear white, and fainter stars, red. It is a 60-second exposure, taken on April 8, 2009, one day after the spacecraft’s dust cover was jettisoned.
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Kepler was designed to hunt for planets like Earth. The mission will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at the same stars, looking for periodic dips in brightness. Such dips occur when planets cross in front of their stars from our point of view in the galaxy, partially blocking the starlight.
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To achieve the level of precision needed to spot planets as small as Earth, Kepler’s images are intentionally blurred slightly. This minimizes the number of saturated stars. Saturation, or “blooming,” occurs when the brightest stars overload the individual pixels in the detectors, causing the signal to spill out into nearby pixels.
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Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Hot "Jupiter" planet, TrES-2
Hot "Jupiter" planet, TrES-2
This image zooms into a small portion of Kepler’s full field of view. At the center of the field is a star with a known “hot Jupiter” planet, named “TrES-2,” zipping closely around it every 2.5 days. Kepler will observe TrES-2 and other known planets as a test to demonstrate that it is working properly, and to obtain new information about those planets.nn
The area pictured is one-thousandth of Kepler’s full field of view, and shows hundreds of stars at the very edge of the constellation Cygnus. The image has been color-coded so that brighter stars appear white, and fainter stars, red. It is a 60-second exposure, taken on April 8, 2009, one day after the spacecraft’s dust cover was jettisoned.
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Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
