CCDs for Kepler

Chelmsford-based aerospace component manufacturer e2v has supplied the charged-coupled device (CCD) imaging sensors to be used by Kepler, NASA’s mission to find Earth-like planets.

The Kepler spacecraft was launched on its three-and-a-half-year mission from Cape Canaveral on 6 March with 42 of e2v’s CCD90 high-performance CCDs on board.

Kepler was designed by NASA and Ball Aerospace & Technology to monitor more than 100,000 sun-like stars in our galaxy, looking for tiny reductions in their light output that could signal the passage of a planet in front of them.

The frequency of the orbit - the year length of the planet - will determine whether the planet is in the habitable zone, or the distance from the star where there could be liquid water, considered essential to life.

According to NASA, for a planet in an Earth-size orbit, the chance of it being aligned to produce a visible transit is less than one per cent. For an Earth-size planet transiting a solar-like star, the change in brightness is only 84 parts per million.

Ball Aerospace designed, built and tested Kepler’s photometer, a specially designed 0.95m-aperture, wide field-of-view Schmidt telescope with a 1.4m primary mirror. The array of CCDs takes intentionally defocused images to improve the photometric precision.