Engineering topics

Steve Bryson

Publications and source records attributed to Steve Bryson.

4 records

NASA NTRS2020

A Habitable-zone Earth-sized Planet Rescued from False Positive Status

We report the discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a low-mass star called Kepler-1649. The planet, Kepler-1649 c, is 1.06(+0.15, -0.10.) times the size of Earth and transits its 0.1977 ± 0.0051 Mʘ “mid” M-dwarf host star every 19.5 days. It receives 74% ± 3% the incident flux of Earth, giving it an equilibrium temperature of 234 ± 20 K and placing it firmly inside the circumstellar habitable zone. Kepler-1649 also hosts a previously known inner planet that orbits every 8.7 days and is roughly equivalent to Venus in size and incident flux. Kepler-1649 c was originally classified as a false positive (FP) by the Kepler pipeline, but was rescued as part of a systematic visual inspection of all automatically dispositioned Kepler FPs. This discovery highlights the value of human inspection of planet candidates even as automated techniques improve, and hints that terrestrial planets around mid to late M-dwarfs may be more common than those around more massive stars.

Andrew Vanderburg↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Model Validation of Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraph for LUVOIR-A in Vacuum

The Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraph (PIAACMC) is a coronagraph architecture for the next generation of large space telescopes optimized for habitable exoplanet imaging that can achieve attractive theoretical performance with high throughput at small inner working angles (IWA). PIAACMC designs are compatible with large, on-axis, segmented apertures such as the Large UV / Optical/ Infrared A (LUVOIR-A) concept currently being considered by the decadal survey review which would greatly enhance the possibility to achieve statistically significant scientific yields and signal quality for direct imaging exoplanet surveys. PIAACMC has been recently implemented for LUVOIR-A and is currently being tested in vacuum at JPL’s High-Contrast Imaging Testbed (HCIT). In this work, we review the theoretical performance of the PIAACMC instrument designed to meet a 1e-9 raw contrast goal in 10% broadband light in a region from 2-8 L/D both before and after the wavefront control loop. We use empirical measurements from the vacuum testbed to verify the instrument model and its performance including line-of-sight errors, instrument alignment, and fabricated components. In particular, the model verification includes measured sags of the manufactured PIAA mirrors by NuTek. The CMC mask was manufactured at JPL’s Microdevices Laboratory and we include surface profile characterization measurement. We assess the impact on performance of the different manufacturing and alignment errors.

High-Contrast Imaging↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Probing ExoMiner for Effectiveness against False Alarms in Kepler Data

We present a study on the effectiveness of ExoMiner against False Alarms in Kepler data. ExoMiner is a deep learning model that was used to validate around 370 Kepler Objects of Interest. We follow the analysis conducted in Coughlin et al (2017) “DR25 Robovetter Completeness and Effectiveness” for Robovetter, a rule-based model used to vet TCEs for this data release and automatically generate the Q1-Q17 DR 25 KOI Table. The ExoMiner model is trained on observed transit data from Kepler Q1-Q17 DR25 and evaluated on Kepler inverted and scrambled data. The results provide a more comprehensive insight into the capacities and limitations of ExoMiner, especially the vetting of not-transit-like signals and, more generally, the use of deep learning models to model transit photometry data for vetting and validation purposes.

exoplanet↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Towards A Better Measurement of eta-Earth and Beyond Via Modernizing the Kepler Pipeline: An Update

The measurement of the occurrence of rocky habitable-zone planets orbiting Sun-like stars (eta-Earth), is a fundamental quantity for guiding our search for habitable exoplanets. Despite being launched 15 years ago, NASA’s Kepler mission remains responsible for finding the majority of all known exoplanet candidates relevant to eta-Earth, ushering in a new era of exoplanet demographics studies and continuing to drive planet occurrence rate calculations. However, the paucity of detections of likely rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars remains a limiting factor for estimating eta-Earth. We describe our five-year project for modernizing the Kepler planet detection and vetting pipeline in order to produce a more complete and reliable exoplanet catalog, which will lead to more accurate and precise measurements of eta-Earth. First, we are currently porting the original Kepler pipeline code from MATLAB to Python. We will then describe new stellar catalogs based on Gaia and ground-based imaging data, and ways to improve the pipeline detection and vetting algorithms. We will provide an update on the current state of this work. When completed, we will use this new pipeline and catalog to calculate updated estimates of eta-Earth. The full, updated pipeline code in Python, as well as all our inputs and results, will be made available to the public for detailed exoplanet occurrence-rate and demographics studies.

kepler↗