Kepler space telescope in the context of "Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes"

Kepler-7b is one of the first five exoplanets to be confirmed by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, and was confirmed during the first 34 days of Kepler's science operations. It orbits a star slightly hotter and significantly larger than the Sun that is expected to soon reach the end of the main sequence. Kepler-7b is a hot Jupiter that is about half the mass of Jupiter, but is nearly 1.5 times its size; at the time of its discovery, Kepler-7b was the second most diffuse planet known, surpassed only by WASP-17b. It orbits its host star every five days at a distance of approximately 0.06 AU (9,000,000 km; 5,600,000 mi). Kepler-7b was announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on January 4, 2010. It is the first extrasolar planet to have a crude map of cloud coverage.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), was an infrared space telescope that was active between 2003 and 2020. Spitzer was the third space telescope dedicated to infrared astronomy, following IRAS (1983) and ISO (1995–1998). It was the first spacecraft to use an Earth-trailing orbit, later used by the Kepler planet-finder.

The planned mission period was to be 2.5 years with a pre-launch expectation that the mission could extend to five or slightly more years until the onboard liquid helium supply was exhausted. This occurred on 15 May 2009. Without liquid helium to cool the telescope to the very low temperatures needed to operate, most of the instruments were no longer usable. However, the two shortest-wavelength modules of the IRAC camera continued to operate with the same sensitivity as before the helium was exhausted, and continued to be used into early 2020 in the Spitzer Warm Mission.

An exocomet, or extrasolar comet, is a comet outside the Solar System, which includes rogue comets and comets that orbit stars other than the Sun. The first exocomets were detected in 1987 around Beta Pictoris, a very young A-type main-sequence star. There are now (as of February 2019) a total of 27 stars around which exocomets have been observed or suspected.

The majority of discovered exocometary systems (Beta Pictoris, HR 10, 51 Ophiuchi, HR 2174, HD 85905, 49 Ceti, 5 Vulpeculae, 2 Andromedae, HD 21620, Rho Virginis, HD 145964, HD 172555, Lambda Geminorum, HD 58647, Phi Geminorum, Delta Corvi, HD 109573, Phi Leonis, 35 Aquilae, HD 24966, HD 38056, HD 79469 and HD 225200) are around very young A-type stars. The relatively old shell star Phi Leonis shows evidence of exocomets in the spectrum and comet-like activity was detected around the old F2V-type star Eta Corvi. In 2018 transiting exocomets were discovered around F-type stars, using data from the Kepler space telescope. Some late B-type star (e.g. 51 Ophiuchi, HD 58647) are known to host exocomets.

William J. (Bill) Borucki (born 1939) is a space scientist who worked at the NASA Ames Research Center. Upon joining NASA in 1962, Borucki joined the group conducting research on the heat shield for Apollo program spacecraft. He later turned his attention to the optical efficiency of lightning strikes in the atmospheres of planets, investigating the propensity that these lightning strikes could create molecules that would later become the precursors for life. Subsequently, Borucki's attention turned to extrasolar planets and their detection, particularly through the transit method. In light of this work, Borucki was named the principal investigator for NASA's Kepler space telescope mission, launched on March 7, 2009 and dedicated to a transit-based search for habitable planets. In 2013, Borucki was awarded the United States National Academy of Sciences's Henry Draper Medal for his work with Kepler. In 2015 he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Kepler-37c is an exoplanet discovered by the Kepler space telescope in February 2013. With an orbital period of 21 days, it is located 209 light-years away, in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-37d is an exoplanet discovered by the Kepler space telescope in February 2013. It is located 209 light years away, in the constellation Lyra. With an orbital period of 39.8 days, it is the largest of the three known planets orbiting its parent star Kepler-37.

A 2021 study detected Kepler-37d via radial velocity, finding a mass of about 5.4 M_🜨, but a 2023 study instead found an upper limit on its mass of only 2 M_🜨. In either case, it is not a rocky planet, but a low-density planet rich in volatiles.

The High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) is a high-precision echelle planet-finding spectrograph installed in 2002 on the ESO's 3.6m telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. The first light was achieved in February 2003. HARPS has discovered over 130 exoplanets to date, with the first one in 2004, making it the most successful planet finder behind the Kepler space telescope. It is a second-generation radial-velocity spectrograph, based on experience with the ELODIE and CORALIE instruments.

A Schmidt camera, also referred to as the Schmidt telescope, is a catadioptric astrophotographic telescope designed to provide wide fields of view with limited aberrations. The design was invented by Bernhard Schmidt in 1930.

Some notable examples are the Samuel Oschin telescope (formerly Palomar Schmidt), the UK Schmidt Telescope and the ESO Schmidt; these provided the major source of all-sky photographic imaging from 1950 until 2000, when electronic detectors took over. A recent example is the Kepler space telescope exoplanet finder.