There is finally a new mission manager update here. The most important points are: (1) "This was the second full quarter in a row with no significant anomalies or unplanned science breaks"; and (2) over 200 abstracts have been accepted for the First Kepler Science Conference at NASA Ames Research Center Dec. 5-9.

More information about the conference is here. The sessions will include:

• Asteroseismology Across the HR Diagram
• Earth-analog and sub-Neptune-size Planets
• Eclipsing and Interacting Binaries
• Ensemble Asteroseismology of Solar-type Stars
• Exoplanet Theory
• Extragalactic and Other Astrophysics
• Giant Planets and Planet Atmospheres
• Multiple Planet Systems
• Red Giant Oscillations
• Stellar Activity and Rotation
• The Kepler Mission and Exoplanet Statistics

Lastly, there is an article about progress on the mission extension proposal at Space.com here.

Kepler-18b, 18c, and 18d have been announced. They are a super-earth class planet and two Neptune class planets in close orbit around a sun-sized star. Kepler-18c and 18d are in a slightly out of phase 2:1 orbital resonance. Kepler-18b is described as being "validated" rather than "verified," since its existence has been confirmed by a probability argument based on the absence of apparent background objects in a high resolution image obtained with the Palomar 5-meter telescope. If we set the bar at validation, the discovery process for smaller planets should go considerably more quickly.

Predictably, the Kepler team has scheduled a press conference of its own on Thursday at 2 pm EDT. Interestingly, they have invited a visual effects specialist from Industrial Light and Magic to the event. Stay tuned. A paper in this week's Science will follow. See: http://www.space.com/12938-nasa-kepler-pla...m-thursday.html. (Could they have found a binary star system with a planet? That would explain the ILM connection...)

Oh, definitely. The timing is not coincidental. The HARPS team spoke this morning at the "Extreme Solar System II" conference in Wyoming from 9:00 - 9:15, then scheduled the press conference for 10:00. Kepler results will be featured in several talks later on. Here's a sample:

Monday, September 12

"Kepler Results," Eric Ford, 2:00 - 2:15
"New Kepler Results," Jason Rowe, 2:15 - 2:30
"The Validation of a 2 R_Earth Planet Showing Transit Timing Variations with Kepler and Warm Spitzer," Sarah Ballard, 2:30 - 2:45
"Update to Intrinsic Planetary Frequencies Based on Kepler Observations," William J. Borucki," 4:15 - 4:30
"Spitzer Observations Suggest a Low Kepler False Postive Rate," Jean-Michel Desert, 4:30 -4:45

And too many more to list, all week. So there are plenty of exoplanets to discover and there is plenty of limelight to share. I am intensely looking forward to learning more soon!

There is a nice news article in the latest issue of Nature describing the Kepler Mission's need for a mission extension to achieve its primary goals. For those who have access, the article is available here. for those who don't, the salient points are these:

• Due to the extra signal noise in a large proportion of the Kepler sample of stars, smaller planets are more difficult to detect. See R. L. Gilliland et al. preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5207; 2011.
  
• It is likely that the stellar noise is due to the equivalent of sun spots, and the higher activity would suggest that half of the Kepler stars are younger than the sun, an unexpected result if it proves true.
  
• A full eight years would be required to definitively pin down the frequency of earth-like planets in the sample. Because of budget shortfalls, an extension is by no means certain; a decision is expected next spring.
  
• If Kepler does not get the hoped for extension, the team may need to restrict their search to planets at least 1.2 x the size of earth.
  
• "More exoplanet discoveries are expected to be announced next week in Moran, Wyoming, at a conference on extreme solar systems."
  
• The next data release will come in two weeks. It is based on 674 million observations recorded from September to December 2009.

As most have heard by now, there have been at least two interesting Kepler announcements at the AAS 218 meeting, one dealing with the abundance of multi-planet systems, the other an announcement of the hot super-earth Kepler 10c. The press releases are available on the Kepler website. The first announcement, "Kepler’s Astounding Haul of Multiple Planet Systems," has a very cool animation showing the systems. The second, "Kepler-10c and a New Method to Validate Planets," discusses the Blender technique of validating candidates. Archives of the presentations, including slides, are available on the site.

Of course that doesn't mean that you'll only get discovery announcements around those dates, as we've seen. If the current follow up season from ground telescopes provides confirmation of candidate planets, especially those based on data already released from the embargo, we'll hear about those before next summer, I'm sure.

Adapted from the Kepler mission FAQ:

When does the proprietary period end for Kepler Data?
The table below lists the release dates for Kepler Key Project data, also known as the planetary search data. The data for each quarter (Q1-Q8) has a specific release date based on the Science Utilization Policy. Dates for quarters 7 and later will change if the Mission is extended.
Q1 = 6/15/10
Q2 = 2/01/11
Q3, Q4 = 6/18/12
Q5, Q6 = 6/18/13
Q7 = 9/18/13
Q8 and ff = 9/18/13
For Kepler non-Key Project data the nominal proprietary period is 12 months from ingest of the data into the archive by the DMC. For GO data, the proprietary period is 1 year from ingest of the data into the archive or 6 months after the last data for the proposal are ingested, whichever is later. From time to time, the Project may decide to extend these proprietary periods.

I don't want to speculate. But make no mistake, this is a major announcement. All the heavy hitters are there, including Bill Borucki. This won't just be esoteric info for professional astronomers. It'll be front page stuff.

It's interesting to go to the AAS Seattle Meeting website, type "Kepler" into the advanced search "abstract body" field, and hit return. There are three pages of results, most of them dealing with the mission (rather than the astronomer, for instance, although there are a couple of talks devoted to him, too). Of course the abstracts don't provide any big "reveals," but they do whet your appetite for what will be an exciting meeting--and in just 7 weeks from now.

The paper "Discovery and Rossiter-McLauglin Effect of Exoplanet Kepler-8b" (Jon M. Jenkins et al 2010 ApJ 724 1108) has now been published online.

Interesting quote from Geoffrey Marcy in a recent space.com article:

"Many of the candidates Kepler discovered are now getting verified with radial velocity confirmations. 'On Feb. 1, we'll announce all of them — a huge avalanche of exoplanet candidates,' Marcy said."

The talk turned out to be a nice summary of how Kepler is contributing to the field of asteroseismology. Slides are here.

The Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC) at Aarhus University in Denmark will hold a media teleconference on Tuesday, Oct. 26, at 11 a.m. EDT to discuss the latest discoveries about stars and their structures using data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft." (full release)

Probably not an announcement of planets based on the wording, but probably a significant announcement nevertheless...

Kepler insider, "Dr. Jason Steffen of Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., will shed light on NASA's recent ventures in the stars during the Harry Nelson Endowed Lecture of Astronomy on Thursday, October 21, at 7:30 p.m." at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. For more information, see here.

I'm looking forward to early November. Reason 1: The US midterm elections will be over, so no more political attack ads on TV. Reason 2: Anticipating a Kepler discovery announcement.

The latest update has arrived here. Biggest news: there will be a discovery announcement in early November. Next biggest news: Kepler 9d, the hot superearth, will soon be upgraded from "potential" to "planet."

Almost six weeks since the last manager's update. Wonder if that means they are gearing up for a big announcement in September? Waiting for another batch of papers to finish peer review? I hope so. But then again, maybe they just forgot about the update thing.

Another opportunity to hear Bill Borucki speak will be coming up August 5-8 in Dayton, Ohio, at the Mars Society Convention. Borucki will deliver the plenary address. For more information, see http://www.marssociety.org/portal/kepler-m...iety-convention.

I think that a Kepler@Home project, if technically feasible, would be a fantastic idea. Not only would it make a ton of computation power available, it would give the scientifically literate public a chance to take some kind of ownership of exoplanet discovery. And that could be a very powerful thing, boding well for future missions.

I'm not too worried about public perception. We don't need the science team backtracking on announcements, since that looks bad and calls the data into question. But if the popular press just misinterprets the data, that's primarily an educational opportunity. True, there will be some lingering confusion. But at the end of the Kepler extended mission, we'll have everything wrapped up in a nice digestible package that can get boilerplated into the textbooks and amateur websites.

"Despite overzealous news headlines this week, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has not indentified more than 100 Earth-like planets in the galaxy...[Dimitar] Sasselov was referencing only possible planets among the Kepler data, scientists said...'What Dimitar presented was "candidates,"' said David Koch, the mission's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. 'These have the apparent signature we are looking for, but then we must perform extensive follow-up observations to eliminate false positives, such as background eclipsing binaries. This requires substantial amounts of ground-based observing which is done primarily in the summer observing season'...However, Sasselov did say that what Kepler has learned so far about extrasolar planets offers tantalizing hints that our planet may not be unusual. Among the hundreds of candidate planets, a large percentage of them appear to be Earth-like – that is, small and rocky, rather than large and gassy, like Jupiter. 'Even before we have confirmed the planets among these hundreds of candidates, we can see statistically that the smaller-sized planets will be more common than the large-sized (Jupiter- and Saturn-like ones) in the sample,' Sasselov explained...

For the complete article on Space.com, go here.

There's a new manager's update (here). I like the last sentence: "Meanwhile, the Kepler science team is busy preparing scientific papers for publication about Kepler discoveries."

Interesting paper accepted for publication in Astrobiology (Segura et al.) with implications for Kepler discoveries... It has been widely assumed that earth-like planets orbiting M dwarfs would have habitable zones lying rather too close for comfort to the star. But this study suggests that life on such a world would probably be able to weather even strong stellar flares, if one makes reasonable assumptions about the atmospheric chemistry.

Well, those were single transits observed during a six-week period, right? Only something like one-eighth of all planets in earth-like orbits would have been observed even once during that period.

Also, let's not forget the missing 400. I doubt if they're reserving a bunch of boring candidates...

A nice article for scientifically literate non-specialists in Science News.