This mission is one of the three candidates for NASA's Discovery Program missions . Kepler photometer and spacecraft. If Earths turn out to be rare, we might be alone. The 27 proposals submitted to NASA for its next round of Discovery missions and instruments target a little bit of just about everything there is in the solar system. Read about them .
Photometers provide neither pictures nor spectra.
With a photometer, you get a dip in the star s brightness every time a planet passes by. You re watching an eclipse, measuring the brightness of the star to two parts in 100,000 and noting every time it takes a dip. At the heart of the instrument is a new detector package being developed by a team led by Dunham, along with John Geary of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Rob Philbrick of Ball Aerospace. Transits and photometers are foreign to the techniques that have been used so far to detect planets around other stars. Planets of the solar system, which the Discovery -class projects would explore.