Christina Hedges (NASA Ames/BAERI)

September

Title: What is there left to do with Kepler/K2?

Abstract: The Kepler and K2 missions have provided a wealth of data to the astronomical community, leading to thousands of confirmed exoplanets, and insights into astrophysics ranging from stellar rotation to AGN variability. However, since the mission has stopped taking data, and in light of the new TESS mission, is there any science left in Kepler and K2? In this talk I will discuss three current projects to increase the amount of science from Kepler and K2. I will discuss 1) solar system objects observed in K2, which provide unprecedented opportunities to observe asteroid rotation rates 2) the wealth of crowded and background targets, which provide an opportunity to expand the data set of both Kepler and K2 3) variable background removal, and how to mitigate the effects of rolling band. Each of these projects have direct impacts for TESS observations; TESS has extreme background variability in FFIs which is difficult to model, TESS suffers from greater crowding than Kepler owing to the larger pixels, and 10,000s of main belt asteroids cross the TESS field of view. In this talk, I will discuss how these projects can be used to help our understanding of TESS data and increase the TESS science yield.

Date: 12:15 PM, September 11th, 2019

Location: Morrisroe 102 (Large Conference Room)

Category: Science Talk