1. Kepler Mission Progress: Day 808 William Borucki, Principal Investigator, Kepler Mission, NASA Ames Research Center Dave Latham, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Francois Fressin, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Geoff Marcy, University of California, Berkeley Soren Meibom, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 218 th AAS Meeting May 23, 2011

2. NASA’s Kepler: A Statistical Mission Determine the Frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars. Determine the size and orbital period distributions of planets. Associate the characteristics of the planets with those of their host stars.

3. Functioning Well and Delivering an Abundance of Data Completed first 2 years of science operations Monitoring 165,000 stars Over 5.5 billion brightness measurements obtained 1,235 candidates discovered; hundreds more expected Kepler data has been the subject of 66 publications since Feb 2011 50 Kepler-related talks and posters at AAS

4. Observed Candidate Size vs. Orbital Period Observed Number vs. Planet size From Observations to Statistics We must correct for observational biases to assess the true statistics of Kepler’s planets.

5. Progress in Four Areas Multiple-planet candidates tell us about planetary systems and show promise for confirming small planets. - Dave Latham, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics A new method to validate planets exemplified with the discovery of Kepler-10c. - Francois Fressin, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Using observations to estimate the intrinsic population of planets. - Geoff Marcy, University of California, Berkeley Determining the age of stars and the bounty of stellar astrophysics. - Soren Meibom, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics