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The concept of this artist describes a planetary system. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
The Kepler probe was launched in 2009 with the goal of finding exoplanets in orbit around distant stars. In the years that followed, astronomers used Kepler's observations to discover 2,818 exoplanets, as well as 2,679 exoplanet candidates requiring additional confirmation. On October 30, 2018, NASA announced that Kepler was running out of fuel and would be decommissioned. Although spacecraft operations have ceased, its data will continue to be accessible to the public through the Mikulski Space Telescope Archive (MAST) of the Space Telescopes Research Institute. These data will allow new scientific discoveries for the years to come.
The NASA Kepler spacecraft has completed its major K2 planetary tracking and tracking missions and will be disarmed. However, all of Kepler's data has been and will remain publicly available at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) via the Mikulski Space Telescope Archive (MAST), where it will continue to improve our understanding of the universe.
The Kepler probe was launched in 2009 with the aim of seeking a slight decrease in the luminosity of the stars caused by the passage of exoplanets in orbit crossing in front of them. Using this transit technique, astronomers used Kepler's observations to discover 2,818 exoplanets, as well as 2,679 exoplanet candidates requiring additional confirmation. Kepler focused on the stars near the constellation Swan and revealed, among other discoveries, that small planets are common in our galaxy.
After its four-year core mission, the probe was reconverted to observe the stars near the zodiacal constellations. This second phase of Kepler's scientific program called the K2 mission. During K2, the Kepler spacecraft continued to collect the data necessary for exoplanet hunting and allowed researchers to investigate other astrophysical issues. The Kepler probe has observed supernovae, star clusters such as the Pleiades, and many objects from our own solar system, including Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto.
While the data collection phase for Kepler is complete, Mikulski's STScI Space Telescope Archive will continue to make all Kepler Observatory data available in perpetuity. The MAST archive team recently won a NASA group award for hosting Kepler datasets.
These data will allow new scientific discoveries for the coming years as scientists fully examine them and supplement them with additional observations.
"The search for exoplanets using Kepler's data is still ongoing, many of which are still hiding in the data, ready to be discovered," said Susan Mullally, a scientist working on the Kepler mission. STScI.
Kepler's main mission data for the four years, as well as the four years of the K2 mission, can be downloaded from the MAST website. In addition to the mission data, the archives host community-provided data products that provide improved analysis of the data needed for some of the astrophysical studies or better measurements of the stars observed by Kepler. All data is accessible via the MAST data portal, as well as via its exoplanet-centric interface.
In the future, MAST will host data from NASA's forthcoming exoplanet hunting observatory, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS has just begun its study of almost the entire night sky, looking for exoplanets in orbit among the brightest and closest stars. As during the astronomical passage of the witness, during the last month of Kepler's mission, TESS and Kepler simultaneously observed more than a hundred identical stars.
Explore further:
Kepler's telescope is dead after finding thousands of worlds
More information:
Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes: mast.stsci.edu/portal/Mashup/C … nts / Mast / Portal.html
NASA Kepler Mission: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html
MAST data portal: mast.stsci.edu
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