The Kepler mission: A technical overview

The Kepler mission is a NASA Discovery-class mission designed to continuously monitor the brightness of 100 000 main sequence stars to detect the transits of Earth-size and larger planets. It is a wide field of view photometer with a Schmidt-type telescope and an array of 42 CCDs covering the 100 sq. deg. Field of View (FOV). It has a 0.95 m aperture and a 1.4 m primary and is designed to attain a photometric precision of 2 parts in 10 ⁵ for V = 12 solar-like stars for a 6-hour transit duration. It will continuously observe 100000 stars from V = 9 to V = 15 in the Cygnus constellation for a period of four years with a cadence of 4 per hour. An additional 250 stars can be monitored at a cadence of once per minute to address asteroseismology of stars brighter than V = 11.5. The photometer is scheduled to be launched into heliocentric orbit in 2007. A ground-based program to classify all 450000 stars to V = 15 in the FOV and to conduct a detailed examination of a subset of the stars that show planetary companions is also planned.