Kepler Mission Information
Kepler Mission
The Kepler Mission, a NASA Discovery mission launched on March 6, 2009, was the first space mission dedicated to the search for Earth-sized and smaller planets in the habitable zone of other stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy. Kepler was a special-purpose spacecraft that precisely measured the light variations from thousands of distant stars, looking for planetary transits. When a planet passes in front of its parent star, as seen from our solar system, it blocks a small fraction of the light from that star; this is known as a transit. Searching for transits of distant Earths is like looking for the drop in brightness when a moth flies across a searchlight. Measuring repeated transits, all with a regular period, duration and change in brightness, provides a method for discovering planets and measuring the duration of their orbits—planets the size of Earth and smaller in the habitable zone around other stars similar to our Sun. Kepler continuously monitored over 100,000 stars similar to our Sun for brightness changes produced by planetary transits.
The Kepler Mission came to an end after four years when two of the four reaction wheels, used to point the spacecraft, ceased to function. The Kepler Mission was reborn as the K2 Mission, which ran for an additional five years.
Note: As of March 2020, all Kepler and K2 user support has been transitioned to the NASA Astrophysics archives. For details, see the Kepler/K2 News and User Support page.
Exoplanet Archive Kepler Resources
Kepler Data Product Overview Page
The Kepler project produced a wide range of data products and documentation to assist the community in using data from the mission to help study both exoplanets and other astrophsyical areas. These data range from engineering data on the detectors to lists of planet candidates and includes many of the intermediate data products in the data processing path.
The Kepler Data Product Overview page was created to provide a single location with links to all products and their documentation. There are more than 40 data products listed, which are hosted either at MAST or the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
The page is located at Kepler Data Product Overview page. There is also a downloadable PDF of the page.
The following diagram illustrates the categorization of the data products:
(Click to enlarge)
General Documentation
- Kepler Extended Mission data philosophy
- How to request a Kepler number
- How to request a K2 number
- Search for a Kepler light curve
- K2 Mission page
| Interactive Tables (Also see: How to use interactive tables) | Documentation and Other Information | |
|---|---|---|
| Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) Activity Tables |
 Q1-16
|
|
| Threshold-Crossing Events and Data Validation |  General documentation and links |
|
| Stellar Information for Observed Kepler Targets | Search interface to interactive table: Q1-12, Q1-16, Q1-17 DR 24, and Q1-17 DR 25 |
General documentation and links |
| Kepler, KOI Numbers and KIC Identifiers | Kepler Names |
Table column definitions |
| Completeness and Reliability Products |
|
Completeness and Reliability home
|
| Kepler Simulated Data | The data links on this page all refer to products generated with the Kepler operational data. For links to the simulated data products, see the Kepler Simulated data page. | |
¹ The Cumulative table is a single tab containing a superset of KOIs from all available quarters. Use this link for faster performance when working with only the most current results. ² The combined Cumulative and Quarterly table contains KOI data for different quarters on separate tabs, as well as a superset of the data on a single tab. Use this link to access any of the quarterly activity tables (Q1-6, 1-8, 1-12 or 1-16) or to compare objects across tables. |
||
Additional Mission Resources
- Kepler Science Data Processing Pipeline
- NASA Kepler and K2 Page
- MAST Archive: The Kepler mission archive at MAST contains proprietary and public light curves and pixel data, the Kepler Input Catalog, Data Release Notes and auxillary mission data. Some notable documentation links include:
- The Making of Kepler Planet Candidates: A flow diagram and Q & A article that explains how Kepler data were processed and how, in the extended mission, it was done in public view.
- Kepler Eclipsing Binary catalog (V2). The NASA Exoplanet Archive currently contains information from the published version of the Kepler eclipsing binary catalog (Slawson et al). Recent updates to the catalog are available at http://keplerebs.villanova.edu.
- As a service to the community, we have assembled a wget script to retrieve the Kepler short cadence light curve files for the version prior to DR 24. See this erratum for an explanation of the issue with the DR24 SC data. Only the original FITS files are available and the data release number varies by quarter; see the header keyword DATA_REL.
Last updated: 10 May 2022
