Overview

Ball Aerospace is the prime contractor for NASA’s Kepler Mission to search for rocky, Earth-sized planets around other stars.

For over four years, Kepler will monitor stars similar to Earth’s sun to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems and search for Earth-sized planets. The photometer will continuously measure the brightness of 100,000 stars, searching for planets that transit in front of them. When a planet passes in front of its parent star, it blocks a small fraction of the star’s light. Kepler will detect this brightness change and use it to determine the planet’s size and orbital period.

To date, astronomers have discovered about 150 gas giants, approximately the size of Jupiter and larger. Kepler will be the first spacebased instrument with the ability to search for and detect much smaller, Earth-sized planets.

An engineer inspects the Kepler primary mirror. It was coated with an enhanced silver that allows more light to reach the telescope's detectors.

If all stars have planetary systems, scientists hope to discover about 50 Earth-sized planets, as well as hundreds of larger ones.

Kepler's primary science objective is to detect and measure the frequency of occurrences of Earth-sized planets in a distant star’s habitable zone. The habitable zone is the distance from the star where water is present in liquid form which is considered by scientists to provide the best environment for supporting life.

A second objective of the Kepler mission is to study the variety of sizes and orbits of these planets and to determine if there are additional members of each of these planetary systems. It will also assess the percentage and orbital distribution of planets in multiple-star systems; detect the variety of orbits, sizes, masses, densities, and the range of reflectances of short-period giant planets; and determine the characteristics of stars that host planetary systems. This information will provide an understanding of how planetary systems form and how common Earth-like planets in these systems really are.

Ball Aerospace completed the installation of the charge coupled device modules into the focal plane assembly.

Our Role

Ball Aerospace built the photometer and spacecraft, and managed the system integration and testing for the Discovery Class mission.

Ball Aerospace employed its instrument expertise from successes such as Hubble Space Telescope in the photometer for Kepler and the spacecraft design used in Deep Impact for providing power, communications and telescope pointing.

The photometer and operations are managed by NASA Ames Research Center with the spacecraft, assembly, test and launch managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Kepler launched on March 6, 2009.