Podcaster: Roz Brown & John Troeltzsch
Title: The K2 Mission: Kepler’s Second Act
Organization: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
Link : http://www.ballaerospace.com/file/media/A12283%20K2.pdf; http://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/K2/
Description: The K2 mission is continuing Kepler’s ground-breaking discoveries in the field of exoplanets and expanding its role into new and exciting astrophysical observations. Kepler’s loss of a second spacecraft reaction wheel in 2013, effectively ended data collection in the original Kepler field after 4 years of continuous monitoring. But all other Kepler assets remain intact and are now being used for the K2 mission.
Bio:Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. develops and manufactures spacecraft, advanced instruments and sensors, components, data exploitation systems and RF solutions for strategic, tactical and scientific applications.
Roz Brown is the media relations manager for Ball Aerospace.
John Troeltzsch is the program manager at Ball Aerospace for Kepler, K2 and the B612 Sentinel Mission.
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Transcript:
The K2 mission is continuing Kepler’s ground-breaking discoveries in the field of exoplanets and expanding its role into new and exciting astrophysical observations. Kepler’s loss of a second spacecraft reaction wheel in 2013, effectively ended data collection in the original Kepler field after 4 years of continuous monitoring. But all other Kepler assets remain intact and are now being used for the K2 mission. With me today is John Troeltzsch, Ball’s K2 and Kepler mission program manager.
Q. John, since it launched in 2009, we’ve heard about the amazing discoveries made by the planet-hunting Kepler mission. And although the mission fulfilled its original time-frame, we all hoped it would continue to return information about habitable planets for years to come. Failure of the second reaction wheel ended that phase of the mission. But then, engineers at Ball came up with a work-around for the K2 mission. Tell us about that.
A. Well, first I want to say that Kepler was an enormous success. It did exactly what we were designing it to do. It took four years of data, looking for the prevalence of Earth-sized planets around sun-like stars in our galaxy, and Kepler knocked the ball out of the park on that one. Yet, that wasn’t enough. We want to do more, because here we have this amazing resource in space and we knew it could still do ground-breaking science – we just had to figure out how. That’s where K2 came along. So, in addition to having this great feeling about how well Kepler worked, we now have the cherry on top of the chocolate sundae of K2 being able to get that extra bit of science for everybody.
So the first step after we lost the second reaction wheel was to make sure that Kepler was safe – that we could keep it stable, keep it safe while we went off and figured out exactly what we were dealing with. The next step was to figure out, given the resource that we have with Kepler – what’s left – with two reaction wheels- is there some science we can do? First it was, well maybe not. It’s going to be hard to point it carefully enough, primarily because the sun is trying to roll the telescope. It’s trying to cause us to drift off from what we’re looking at – if you only have two reaction wheels. Then the engineers at Ball Aerospace came up with the idea to use that solar force to help balance the telescope. Now it wouldn’t work pointing at the original Kepler field – we’d have to figure out a new area of the galaxy to point at – and it turns out if you point in the ecliptic it will help us to use the sun’s pressure on either side of the spacecraft to balance that roll we didn’t have control over. So, we set up a K2 mission that would have a series of fields, a series of campaigns looking in the plane of the ecliptic, each about 80 days long. And during that time we would use the solar photon pressure to balance the roll of the telescope to get us almost as good as Kepler’s original pointing. We’re about four times worse than Kepler’s original pointing but still just outstanding for the different kind of science people want to do.
Q. It sounds like using the sun’s rays to steer the spacecraft falls into the just-so-crazy-it-might-work solution?
A. Yes, when I first heard about it I was really skeptical because if you had a perfectly symmetric system it seems like it was feasible, but Kepler is asymmetric – it’s not a perfect, smooth shape. Equipment boxes are mounted to the side of it; the front and the back are different; so I wondered how we could find that balance point. Well, it turns out about a year ago we did a series of six tests and each test was designed to carefully find the balance point with a different sun angle on the telescope. So, by mapping it out and figuring it out step-by-step where the best balance point was we were able to figure out how to best balance it over the whole 80 days.
Q. What information will the astrophysical community get from this new K2 mission they wouldn’t have gotten from the Kepler mission?
A. So, I mentioned, part of the job was to figure out how to use Kepler and what we could do. The second was to figure out what might be available for the scientists to use. So, we went and explained to scientists what capabilities Kepler, or K2 in this case would offer. And what they came up with was the ability to look at completely different regions of the sky than Kepler. They could look at young, star-forming regions of the sky. They could look at open clusters. They could look for supernovas and microlensing in far away galaxies. These things were all unavailable during the first mission because we starred at the same part of the sky. Now, every 80 days we look at a different part of the sky. So, sometimes we’re looking into very dense regions, sometimes we’re looking into very sparse regions. Overall, it’s a much richer set of targets than we had for the Kepler mission.
Q. I hear K2 will involve more astronomers than the original Kepler mission. How will that work?
A. So one of the best parts about K2 is that we’ve been able to figure out a way to involve the general astronomic community. With the Kepler science, they had a very core group of people that worked for years and years to set up the experiment and analyze the data. But since K2 is looking at such a rich variety of targets, we thought why not let them decide what to look at. So, for every single campaign – every one of these 80 day campaigns – we are opening it up to astronomers around the world to submit their very best ideas for what you might look at, at that part of the sky. And the results have been outstanding. The astronomers have come up with really great things and they’re all very eager to get time on the telescope so they’re competing for the very best ideas to use Kepler now
Q. So, now we’re into a series of 80 day, ecliptic-pointed campaigns. How are things going?
A. We’ve had some learning pains. We originally, at the beginning of the year we were having to fine-tune things and we’d get everything running for a few days and then we’d be thrown another surprise. But one by one we’ve been peeling the layers off the onion and figuring out how to make it work best in the K2 mode. And the good news is now we’re in campaign two. We’ve completed campaign zero and campaign one, and each of those was successful in its own right but campaign two is moving more smoothly than any of the previous campaigns and I expect we’re going to build on that as we go out into the future campaigns. We talk to the spacecraft, we communicate with the spacecraft approximately every 40 days and we may push that out to every 80 days. So, to a large extent, Kepler is back doing its thing. It’s a robot in space helping us understand the universe.
Q. How will the K2 mission help future missions?
A. Kepler’s really opened everyone’s eyes to exoplanets. When we launched Kepler we knew of some exoplanets and we thought there might be many out there, but there was no proof. Kepler has now proven that there are literally planets everywhere. I mean nearly every third star you look up at in the sky really has a pretty good chance of having planets around it. So we’ve moved from the discovery of, are there planets, to what are those planets all about? What are they made of? How did they form? What types of stars do they form around? These questions are going to be answered by astronomers for the next 50 years. But right now they’re really looking at characterization – how to figure out what the atmosphere of those planets might be.
Q. As the program manager for both missions, you’ve been deeply invested in the outcome of Kepler and K2. What‘s it like to watch a astronomy comeback kid?
A. It’s been really both fun and very fulfilling. All of us here at Ball put so many years into the design of the Kepler mission and building it and getting it onto the launch pad and then carefully operating it in space day-by-day and Kepler by itself would have been a great fulfilling program for each of us in our careers. However, the end of Kepler left us wanting more and fortunately we were able to use bright engineers and a lot of hard work and ingenuity to come up with a new mission. So now, instead of just looking back at Kepler, we’re looking back at Kepler and also looking at all that’s been accomplished with K2. It’s really been a fun.
Q. In the meantime, something many people don’t realize, the data already collected by the Kepler mission is still turning up planets. Data that was gathered earlier will still be analyzed for years to come. What are you expectations for the future as far as Kepler’s scientific returns?
A. So Roz as you said, we took a ton of data during Kepler’s primary mission. And that data has really been analyzed for a lot of the planets that are close to their stars. But the stars that are further out, that are in more Earth-like orbits around their stars take a tremendous amount of computing time to find, and software development. So the folks at NASA have been evolving the software for years, making it more powerful and they’re coming up with yet another version of software that should be ready in the next six to nine months. They’ll then run all of Kepler’s data from four years back through that software and they’ll find those planets we couldn’t find the first time around. And those will be smaller planets, so they’ll be in longer period orbits and we’ll find some habitable planets. So, I’m hoping that we’re really looking at Earth’s twin out there somewhere in that data and it will pop up in the next few years.
Thanks for being with us today John. Thank you, Roz. And I’ll encourage anyone out there to look at the Kepler website for more information about K2.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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