Mark Everett
Planetary Science Institute
 

"Groundwork for NASA's Kepler Mission: Creating the Kepler Input Catalog"
 

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission to detect and characterize a sample of Earth-sized and larger transiting extra-solar planets.  The satellite is scheduled for launch in February 2009 and will observe the light curves of a field of >100,000 stars over the course of its 3.5+ year mission.  Kepler relies heavily on ground-based observations to select target stars and confirm suspected planet candidates.  I will describe the Kepler Mission and a ground-based observing program
that is providing the mission with the Kepler Input Catalog, a resource to identify and select the best target stars.