Kepler is a Discovery Program Mission which funds focused planetary science flight missions. The Kepler photometer is designed to do one thing and do it well: find transiting planets in one region of the sky. If our extended mission is funded, we’ll spend at least 6 years staring at the same 105 square degree Field of View (FOV) because that will maximize the planetary discoveries we make.

We do have an open Guest Observer Program so that astronomers who wish to make observations of objects in our FOV can propose to do so, and the GOs have access to 3000 Long Cadence targets (30 minute integrations) and to 25 Short Cadence targets (one minute integrations). Also, once our data products are released, anyone will be able to download the raw or the calibrated data products and conduct science analysis however they wish. All the astrophysicists I know are really jazzed about our mission. We’ve never collected such precise, complete and long photometric data on such a large collection of stars. I’m as excited about the unexpected discoveries as I am about the ones we hope to make!

Regarding how soon we begin to collect science data: there is an awful lot to do to commission and check out the spacecraft and the instrument, and we do launch with a protective dust cover on the Schmidt corrector. We’ll be collecting a significant number of dark frames before we release the cover, since we’ll never get another dark frame ever — Kepler doesn’t have a shutter. Commissioning may take as long as 60 days. We need to do this part well and do it right the first time.

Cheers,
Jon, the Kepler Co-I for Data Analysis

PS What’s big about our photometer is the size of the camera (or focal plane array). It’s composed of 42 CCDs and has 95 Mpixels. The electronics that control and read out the CCDS (and the Fine Guidance Sensor CCDs) are quite impressive — 16 layer boards, 5 board pairs (one for controlling, one for reading out and handling the data), 24 signal processing chains (amplifier stages, correlated double sample and hold, A/D converters, FPGAs to accumulate the integrations from the 6 sec readout (on the Science CCDs). It’s a huge accomplishment on Ball’s part just to get the camera built, let alone the telescope and the spacecraft.

I’ll just shut up now.

I retract my kibbitziness.

Oh, FSM, let them be not entirely Earth-like. A little more rationality amongst the inhabitants would be nice. RAmen.