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W.D. Deininger, D.D. Miller, A.C. Harvey (Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.)
The Kepler Discovery Mission has been developed to monitor a large star field for four years and directly detect Earth-like planets through differential photometry. The mission is launched on a Delta II and flies in a heliocentric orbit. The 903-Kg flight segment consists of a CCD-based photometer instrument and a spacecraft bus. The spacecraft bus is at the base of the flight segment and provides structural support to the photometer. The spacecraft is 3-axis-stablized and uses fine guidance sensors to provide accurate pointing throughout the mission to better than 18.4 arcsec. Reaction wheels are used for attitude adjustments with a cold-gas reaction control system for wheel desaturations. Spacecraft thermal control is largely passive with some active heaters. The spacecraft avionics is based on redundant RAD 750 computers with a throughput of 119 MIPS. The power system produces 812 W EOL using a fixed solar array with a direct energy transfer architecture. Primary data downlink is via a Ka-band HGA to the DSN 34-m antennas.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #2
© YEAR. The American Astronomical Soceity.