Artist's rendering of ESA CHEOPS satellite. Credit: ESA - C. Carreau
Posted on 03/29/2015 5:21:46 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Just like the Pharaoh Cheops, who ruled the ancient Old Kingdom of Egypt, ESA's CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) could be someday ruling in the field of exoplanet hunting. It will be the first mission dedicated to search for transits by means of ultrahigh precision photometry on bright stars already known to host planets...
Large ground-based high-precision Doppler spectroscopic surveys carried out during the last years have identified hundreds of stars hosting planets in the super-Earth to Neptune mass range and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. The characteristics of these stars and the knowledge of the planet ephemerids make them ideal targets for precision photometric measurements from space. CHEOPS will be the only facility able to follow-up all these targets for precise radius measurements...
Knowing where to look and at what time to observe, makes CHEOPS the most efficient instrument to search for shallow transits.
With an accurate knowledge of masses and radii for an unprecedented sample of planets, CHEOPS will set new constraints on the structure and hence on the formation and evolution of planets in this mass range...
CHEOPS is the first of the small-size (S class) missions of ESA, and was selected from 26 other proposed missions. These missions are designed to take full advantage of known technologies. They should be low cost and rapidly developed missions, in order to offer greater flexibility in response to new ideas from the scientific community...
The satellite will fly at an altitude of between 650 and 800km, in a dusk-dawn helio-synchronous orbit, and will have a design lifetime of 3.5 years...
CHEOPS should be able to cover at least 50% of the whole sky for a minimum total duration of 50 days of observation per year and per target.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Artist's rendering of ESA CHEOPS satellite. Credit: ESA - C. Carreau
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