Selection, Prioritization, and Characteristics of Kepler Target Stars

The Kepler Mission began its 3.5 year photometric monitoring campaign in 2009 May on a select group of approximately 150,000 stars. The stars were chosen from the approximately half million in the field of view that are brighter than 16th magnitude. The selection criteria are quantitative metrics designed to optimize the scientific yield of the mission with regard to the detection of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone. This yields more than 90,000 G-type stars on or close to the main sequence, 20,000 of which are brighter than 14th magnitude. At the temperature extremes, the sample includes approximately 3000 M-type dwarfs and a small sample of O- and B-type MS stars (200). The small numbers of giants are included in the sample: approximately 5000 stars with surface gravities log(g) 3.5. We present a brief summary of the selection process and the stellar populations it yields in terms of surface gravity, effective temperature, and apparent magnitude. In addition to the primary, statistically derived target set, several ancillary target lists were manually generated to enhance the science of the mission, examples being: known eclipsing binaries, open cluster members, and high proper motion stars.
Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters,v713 n2 pgs.109-L114, 2010 April 20. Funding for this Discovery mission is provided by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The original document contains color images.