The kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, monitored over 160,000 STARS continuously for four years with a primary science goal of understanding the frequency of exoplanets. The resulting data…

This federal contract award to the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAER Institute), a non-profit research organization, provides $2,686,332.00 in funding for astrophysical research and education related to the Kepler and K2 space telescope missions. The contract is to support the Kepler/K2 Guest Observer (GO) Office in maximizing the scientific impact of these missions through activities such as identifying new areas of scientific exploitation, leading research projects, collaborating with K2 guest observers, and developing data reduction and analysis algorithms. This award is not associated with any set-aside designation. The funding agency is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), under the Science Mission Directorate, and the award supports NASA's goals of expanding scientific knowledge and enabling new discoveries in space and Earth sciences.

The kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, monitored over 160,000 STARS continuously for four years with a primary science goal of understanding the frequency of exoplanets. The resulting data provides a unique combination of high photometric precision, duration, contiguity and source volume. The data collected by the mission and derived data products are archived at NASA archives. The kepler mission ended in 2013 with the failure of the second of four reaction wheels. Developed over the months following this failure, the K2 mission represents a new concept for spacecraft operations that enables continued scientific observations with the kepler space telescope. K2 became fully operational in june 2014 and is expected to continue operating until 2018. The K2 mission entails a series of sequential 80-day long observing campaigns of fields distributed around the ecliptic plane and offers a photometric precision approaching that of the original kepler mission. The scientific community has opportunities to both construct K2 observing programs and mine the kepler and K2 archival data set to produce significant scientific results. The kepler/K2 guest observer (go) office is dedicated to maximizing the scientific impact of these missions through research that includes identifying new areas of scientific exploitation for K2, leading research projects based on kepler and K2 data, collaborating on scientific experiments with the K2 guest observers, providing project-tailored instrument calibrations, developing novel data reduction and analysis algorithms, and constructing observation and data acquisition plans. This proposal is to provide funds for baer researchers to work with the go office to perform astrophysical research and to educate the scientific community about the best practices for using archival data from the kepler mission and to support the community during the ongoing K2 mission.