Habitable Planets Around White Dwarfs: an Alternate Mission for the Kepler Spacecraft
“Our proposed survey requires a total of 200 days of observing time, and will find up to 100 planets in the white dwarf (WD) habitable zone. This survey will maintain Kepler’s spirit of searching for habitable Earths, but near new hosts. With few-day observations and minute-cadences per field, it will also open up a completely unexplored discovery space.”
Keith’s 3 Sep update: Additional Kepler white papers have been posted.
– Kepler: Searching The Habitable Zones of the Brightest Stars
– Kepler: Asteroseismology of Solar-Like Oscillators in a 2-Wheel Mission
– Kepler: Monitoring young associations and open clusters with Kepler in two-wheel mode
– The Kep-Cont Mission: Continuing the observation of high-amplitude variable stars in the Kepler field of view
– The Kepler-SEP Mission: Harvesting the South Ecliptic Pole large-amplitude variables with Kepler
Keith’s 4 Sep update: Even more Kepler white papers have been posted.
– NEOKepler: Discovering Near-Earth Objects Using the Kepler Spacecraft
– Searching for Terrestrial Planets Orbiting in the Habitable Zone of Ultra-Cool Stars and Brown Dwarfs
– New Uses for the Kepler Telescope: A Survey of the Ecliptic Plane For Transiting Planets and Star Formation
A few more white papers will appear at arXiv in the next few days (just submitted two, aware of another two).
The call states all white papers will be released at the Kepler web site.
NASA does not own these white papers. Nothing prohibits their publication elsewhere.
The white papers are publicly available at a dedicated page so you don’t have to dig trough arxiv to find them (and some authors didn’t even bother). Yet people singled out papers _because_ they appeared on arxiv, before the entire collection was made available.
A bunch just appeared online. More to follow, I suspect.