In 1997,
William Borucki added Batalha to the science team and she started work on transit photometry. She has been involved with the Kepler Mission since the design and funding, and as one of the original Co-Investigators was responsible for the selection of the more than 150,000 stars monitored by the telescope. She now works closely with team members at Ames Research Center to identify viable planets from the data of the Kepler mission. She led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of
Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky planet outside the
Solar System. Of a total of 460 observation hours allocated, Batalha's project, 'The Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Program', was awarded 86.9 hours; the highest of any DD-ERS program on the JWST. These observation hours are allocated to be used during the first five months of the telescope's operation. Batalha leads the UC Santa Cruz Astrobiology Initiative, a collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. Following the successful launch of the
James Webb Space Telescope in 2021, Batalha and a team of researchers found unambiguous evidence of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. The team used JWST to observe a Saturn-mass planet called
WASP-39b which orbits very close to a sun-like star about 700 light-years from Earth. Batalha, along with Mark Clampin, Astrophysics Division Director, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Steven L. Finkelstein, Professor of Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin, testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics in 2022. Batalha and the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Early Release Science Team used the James Webb Space Telescope in 2023 to identify water vapor in the atmosphere of WASP-18b and make a temperature map of the planet as it slipped behind, and reappeared from, its star. ==Presentations==