Abstract:NASA's planned Kepler mission uses a space-born Schmidt telescope to search for Earth-size and smaller planets around distant stars using differential photometry. This paper reports the successful design, analysis and implementation of suspending a large actively cooled (-90C) focal plane array with associated electronics inside the warm (0C) Kepler photometer. Since a Schmidt Telescope requires the focal plane to be in the middle of the telescope, it must be suspended while obscuring only a small portion of t… Show more
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