Dust Cover Jettisoned From NASA's Kepler Telescope

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Michael Mewhinney 650-604-3937
NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
michael.s.mewhinney@nasa.gov

News release: 2009-065 April 7, 2009

Dust Cover Jettisoned From NASA's Kepler Telescope

Engineers have successfully ejected the dust cover from NASA's Kepler
telescope, a spaceborne mission soon to begin searching for worlds like Earth.

"The cover released and flew away exactly as we designed it to do," said Kepler
Project Manager James Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif. "This is a critical step toward answering a question that has come down to
us across 100 generations of human history -- are there other planets like Earth,
or are we alone in the galaxy?"

Kepler, which launched on March 6 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., will spend three-
and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy for
signs of Earth-size planets. Some of the planets are expected to orbit in a star's
"habitable zone," a warm region where water could pool on the surface. The
mission's science instrument, called a photometer, contains the largest camera
ever flown in space -- its 42 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) will detect slight
dips in starlight, which occur when planets passing in front of their stars partially
block the light from Kepler's view.

The telescope's oval-shaped dust cover, measuring 1.7 meters by 1.3 meters (67
inches by 52 inches), protected the photometer from contamination before and
after launch. The dust cover also blocked stray light from entering the telescope
during launch -- light that could have damaged its sensitive detectors. In addition,
the cover was important for calibrating the photometer. Images taken in the dark
helped characterize noise coming from the instrument's electronics, and this
noise will later be removed from the actual science data.

"Now the photometer can see the stars and will soon start the task of detecting
the planets," said Kepler's Science Principal Investigator William Borucki at
NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We have thoroughly
measured the background noise so that our photometer can detect minute
changes in a star's brightness caused by planets."

At 7:13 p.m. PDT on April 7, engineers at Kepler's mission operations center at
the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, Colo., sent
commands to pass an electrical current through a "burn wire" to break the wire
and release a latch holding the cover closed. The spring-loaded cover swung
open on a fly-away hinge, before drifting away from the spacecraft. The cover is
now in its own orbit around the sun, similar to Kepler's sun-centric orbit. See an
animation of the event at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/videos/cover.html .

With the cover off, starlight is entering the photometer and being imaged onto its
focal plane. Engineers will continue calibrating the instrument using images of
stars for another several weeks, after which science observations will begin.

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission. NASA's Ames Research Center Ames is
the home organization of the science principal investigator, and is responsible for
the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Kepler
mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo., is
responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supporting mission
operations.

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kepler .

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