Kepler, a NASA Strategic mission, launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit on March 6, 2009, is designed to stare at a 105 square degree region of the sky in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. The mission's goal is to obtain long-term, unfiltered, and precise light curves of up to 100,000 cool stars and search for periodic transits of planets as small as the Earth. A secondary objective of the mission is to study rapid oscillations of the target stars in order to determine their ages, radii, and metallic chemical compositions. A general overview of the mission can be found at the Kepler mission web site. The in depth science pages lay out the scientific objectives in greater detail.

The post-commissioning phase of the mission began on May 12, 2009. Since then, Kepler has and will continue to monitor the same sky field almost continuously. The exception is for monthly data downlinks during which the spacecraft must turn away from the monitored field, reorient toward the Earth for the downlink, and return to the field. The spacecraft also "rolls" every three months to allow for continous illumination of Kepler's solar arrays. The first such roll, ending the first quarter, occurred on June 18, 2009. A table of scheduled quarterly rolls is given on the MAST/Kepler FAQ page (see FAQ tab in left "gutter"). The fields of view of 42 CCDs covers a four-way symmetrical pattern on the sky such that the same stars remain on the detectors during the mission. Although the Kepler field covers a large sky area containing millions of stars, data from small regions around only 150,000 targets are recorded and stored onboard the spacecraft. The default integration time is about 30 minutes, although a small number of asteroseismology and other targets of interest are recorded with integration times of about 1 minute.

The mission will have a nominal lifetime of three and one half years to pursue its core science objectives. These objectives will be carried out by Science Principal Investigator William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, the Kepler Science Team, the Kepler Participating Scientists, and the Kepler Asteroseismology Science Consortium. In addition, a limited Guest Observer (GO) program, dedicated to general (non-exoplanetary) astrophysics has been established. Proposal solicitations will be made on an annual basis, resources permitting, by NASA Headquarters. The GO program is administered from NASA's Ames Research Center. Information of interest to potential Cycle 2 GO proposers can be found at the GO program website and in NASA's omnibus announcement Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences - ROSES 2009. Investigators interested in whether targets included in the MAST/Kepler ("KIC") database lie on any of the 42 Kepler detector fields should first consult the Kepler Target Search form. To determine if an object not in the catalog (or just an arbitrary position) falls on one of the detectors, the investigator may consult the CCD Pixel Calculator page. However, the user is advised that this tool is based on pre-launch data and the assumed pointing is accurate to only a few pixels. A map of where Kepler's Field of View in the sky was obtained from the Project and is shown below. Clicking on this image will bring up a magnified view.

Late during its commissioning phase, Kepler monitored over 50,000 stars brighter than V = 13.8 magnitudes as calibration targets. As of November, 2009 the Kepler Project has released light curves and associated products for over eight thousand of these targets from this effort.

As the mission proceeds, the Project will periodically drop stars as exoplanetary search candidates. As it does so, MAST will provide access to lists of targets and/or data released as notifications on the News corner of this page. In addition, data for these stars will also become nonproprietary on the Kepler Data Search and Retrieval page.

This page will be updated periodically as new information becomes available.