Jon Jenkins Discusses the Kepler Mission: Music From the Stars

The Kepler Mission began its science observations just under two years ago on May 12, 2009, initiating NASA’s first search for Earth-like planets. Initial results and light curves from Kepler are simply breath-taking, including  confirmation of the first unquestionable rocky planet, Kepler-10b, and Kepler-11b, a system of 6 transiting planets orbiting one Sun-like star. Kepler released light curves for the first 120 days of observations for over 150,000 target stars on February 2, 2011, and announced the identification of over 1235 planetary candidates, including 68 candidates smaller than 1.25 Earth radii, and 54 candidates in or near the habitable zone of their parent star.

Dr. Jenkins will discuss how much we’ve learned over the 24 months about the instrument and the stars and will present sound clips based on Kepler observations that allow us to hear acoustic waves trapped inside stellar atmospheres that modulate the intensity of the light from these stars.

Jon Jenkins is a research scientist for the SETI Institute (www.seti.org) at NASA Ames Research Center where he conducts research on data processing and detection algorithms for discovering transiting extrasolar planets. He is the Co-Investigator for Data Analysis for NASA Discovery Program’s Kepler Mission (http://www.kepler.nasa.gov).  As the Kepler Mission Analysis Lead, Dr. Jenkins is responsible for developing algorithms for the Kepler Science Operations Center science pipeline and  leads the team of scientific programmers who are implementing the software  for the science pipeline. In 2010 Dr. Jenkins received NASA’s Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal for his numerous technical achievements throughout development, commissioning and operational phases, which have been critical to the success of Kepler.