Kepler Space Telescope Archives

The final observing campaign of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope lasted only a month. As the spacecraft began to run low on attitude control fuel, it couldn’t maintain its position long enough to collect useful observations. In the end, astronomers only had about seven days of high-quality data. A research team worked with a group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers and found three planets in the last bit of data. CREDIT NASA/JPL-Caltech (K. Walbolt)

Astronomers Discover Planets In NASA Kepler’s Final Days Of Observations

A team of astrophysicists and citizen scientists have identified what may be some of the last planets NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope observed during its nearly decade-long mission.

by SpaceRef June 2, 2023July 15, 2024

Light curves of each of the three planet candidate systems. Top row: The full 7.25-d high-quality discovery light curves of each of our systems are shown on the top produced via the process outlined in Section 2.1. Bottom row: Zoomed-in light curves near the three single transits, along with the best-fitting transit model from Section 3.2. The best-fitting parameters are outlined in Table 4. We detected additional transits of two of these three planet candidates, which are shown in Fig. 2. We also note that there are two small dipping features in the light curve of EPIC 245978988 that can be seen around t = 3538 d and t = 3543.5 d. We conclude that these are systematic because they are not robust to changing data reduction parameters. -- Royal Astronomical Society

Press Release

Astronomers Discover The Last Planets Seen By Kepler Space Telescope

by SpaceRef May 30, 2023July 15, 2024

Kepler Space Telescope

Astronomers Discover Planets In NASA Kepler’s Final Days Of Observations

Astronomers Discover The Last Planets Seen By Kepler Space Telescope

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