Kepler pipeline S/N studies. II. 2011 data

We inject simulated transiting planet signals into the pixel data of ~10000 targets, spanning one year of observations, and process the pixels as normal. We compare the set of detections made by the pipeline with the expectation from the set of simulated planets, and construct a sensitivity curve of signal recovery as a function of the signal-to-noise of the simulated transit signal train.

The sensitivity curve does not meet the hypothetical maximum detection efficiency; however, it is not as pessimistic as some of the published estimates of the detection efficiency. For the FGK stars in our sample, the sensitivity curve is well fit by a gamma function with the coefficients a=4.35 and b=1.05. We also find that the pipeline algorithms recover the depths and periods of the injected signals with very high fidelity, especially for periods longer than 10 days.