The NASA Kepler Mission

The NASA Kepler and K2 missions have made fundamental, paradigm-changing advances in essentially every area of astrophysics and planetary science. While known for their breakthrough discoveries in exoplanets - especially small rocky worlds orbiting in the habitable zone of their host suns - these missions have also continued to make numerous scientific advances in solar system science, stellar astrophysics and extragalactic astronomy. This book is devoted to the Kepler and K2 missions and covers the tremendous new discoveries made in the areas of spacecraft engineering, asteroseismology, binary and variable stars, stellar astrophysics, white dwarfs, asteroids and comets, active galaxies, supernovae, black holes, and of course exoplanets of all types. It is suitable for the interested layperson, pupils of science and space missions, and advanced science students and researchers wishing for an introduction and highly focused memoir of the NASA Kepler mission and its amazing accomplishments.

Key Features

• Provides an introduction to advanced science presentations on all major mission topics
• Written by the scientists who made the discoveries
• Includes engineering and spacecraft discussions
• Describes the effects of the mission on science and the world, integrating many of the major discoveries and their graphics, movies, and materials
• Includes side boxes of interest, for example exoplanet naming conventions and perspectives from noted scientists

The text is nicely written in a somewhat personal style, easily accessible yet precise and fully referenced to scientific publications. The individual contributions are short and nicely integrated into the main text by use of text boxes, which increases the readability. It is overall very accessible, also owing to the fact that no mathematics or formal scientific training is necessarily required to understand most of the material presented.