The Kepler Mission: A wide-field transit search for terrestrial planets

The Kepler Mission is a NASA Discovery mission which will continuously monitor the brightness of at least 100,000 main sequence stars, to detect the transits of terrestrial and larger planets. It is scheduled to be launched in 2007 into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. It is a wide-field photometer with a Schmidt-type telescope and array of 42 CCDs covering the 100 square degree field-of-view. It has a 1-m aperture which enables a differential photometric precision of 2 parts in 100,000 for 12th magnitude solar-like stars over a 6.5-hour transit duration. It will continuously observe dwarf stars from 8th to 15th magnitude in the Cygnus constellation, for a period of four years, with a cadence of 4 measurements per hour. Hundreds of terrestrial planets should be detected if they are common around solar-type stars. Ground-based spectrometry of stars with planetary candidates will help eliminate false-positives, and determine stellar characteristics such as mass and metallicity. A null result would imply that terrestrial planets are rare.