The Kepler photometer focal plane array

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Abstract
The Kepler instrument is designed to detect Earth size planets in the "habitable zone" orbiting 9<mv<16, F through M type stars. A 0.95 m aperture Schmidt telescope feeds the 96 million pixel Kepler focal plane array resulting in ~13° diameter FOV, so that greater than 100,000 suitable stars in the FOV are continuously monitored over a three and a half year mission. Detection of planetary transits is made possible through 20 ppm differential photometry using pixel data from a focal plane array specifically developed for Kepler. The Kepler focal plane array is suspended above the primary mirror and consists of twenty one 2K x 2K Science CCD modules mounted on a curved Invar substrate with four output taps per module. Four fine guidance sensor (FGS) CCD modules are mounted to the corners of the Invar substrate to gather additional pointing information for the Attitude Control System in order to attain the required <2.5 milli-pixel pointing accuracy. A space staring radiator and a closed loop thermal control system maintains the CCD module temperatures at -85°C with <10mK thermal stability. Low noise electronics reads out both the Science and FGS CCD modules at a 3 MHz pixel rate. In order to achieve a 4-sigma detection of an Earth-sized planet orbiting a 12th magnitude Sun-like star, the overall noise budget allocates 150 e- to the read noise of each Science CCD module output. This paper discusses key elements of the Kepler focal plane array design, development, characterization and performance results.

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