NASA's Kepler Mission Wins Aviation Week Award

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
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Whitney Clavin (818) 354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2012-065 March 7, 2012

NASA's Kepler Mission Wins Aviation Week Award

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-065&cid=release_2012-065

NASA's Kepler mission has been named the winner of the 2012 Aviation Week Laureate Award in
the Space category, announced last night at the 55th annual black-tie awards dinner in Washington.

Accepting the award on behalf of the Kepler mission team were Roger Hunter, Kepler project
manager at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.; and James Fanson, who was the
Kepler project manager during mission development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. Fanson is currently the assistant director for JPL's Optical Systems, Astronomy,
Physics and Space Technology Directorate.

"With nearly 1,000 scientists throughout the world actively engaged in investigating the bounty of
Kepler data, the team is honored to marshal in a new age of planetary discovery," said William
Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at Ames. "We are delighted by the results and of the promise
of Kepler's most profound discoveries that await."

Aviation Week's annual Laureate Awards recognize individuals and teams for their extraordinary
accomplishments. Their achievements embody the spirit of exploration, innovation, vision or any
combination of these attributes that inspire others to strive for significant, broad-reaching progress in
aviation and aerospace.

Previous winners in the Space category include the Radar Imaging Commercialization Team; the
International Space Station program managers; Elon Musk, co-founder of SpaceX; and Yoshisada
Takizawa, Selene project manager, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler spacecraft has detected more than 2,300 planet candidates
and confirmed 61 as planets. The early findings contain more than 200 Earth-size planet candidates
and more than 900 that are smaller than two times the size of Earth. Of the 46 planet candidates
found in the habitable zone, the region in the planetary system where liquid water could exist, 10 of
these candidates are smaller than twice the size of Earth.

Kepler is a space observatory trailing Earth around the sun, currently at a distance of more than 30
million miles (48 million kilometers). Kepler's task is to measure the change in brightness of more
than 150,000 stars looking for the telltale signature of a planet passing, or transiting, in front of its
host star. Three transits are required to verify a signal as a planet.

Kepler also recently won the Space Foundation's John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr., Award for Space
Exploration (see
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2012/kepler_spacefoundation_award.html).

Ames Research Center manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and
science data analysis. JPL managed the Kepler mission's development.

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and
supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the
University of Colorado in Boulder.

The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science
data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA's Science Mission
Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

More information about Kepler is online at http://www.nasa.gov/kepler and
http://www.kepler.nasa.gov .

More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

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