| Title | ESA Selects ARIEL Exoplanet Survey as a Medium Class Mission | |
| Date | Friday March 23 2018, @05:25AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the under-the-cosmic-sea dept. | ||
The European Space Agency's Science Programme Committee has selected ARIEL as its fourth medium-class mission for the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in mid-2028, and will focus on studying the atmospheres of exoplanets:
ARIEL, the Atmospheric Remote‐sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large‐survey mission, was selected by ESA today as part of its Cosmic Vision plan. [...] ARIEL will address fundamental questions on what exoplanets are made of and how planetary systems form and evolve by investigating the atmospheres of hundreds of planets orbiting different types of stars, enabling the diversity of properties of both individual planets as well as within populations to be assessed.
[...] The mission will focus on warm and hot planets, ranging from super-Earths to gas giants orbiting close to their parent stars, taking advantage of their well-mixed atmospheres to decipher their bulk composition. ARIEL will measure the chemical fingerprints of the atmospheres as the planet crosses in front of its host star, observing the amount of dimming at a precision level of 10–100 parts per million relative to the star.
The UK will lead the mission:
Ariel is likely to cost Esa about €460m (£405m) for the spacecraft chassis, the launch vehicle and operations. As is customary for science missions like this, the agency's individual member states pick up the cost of the scientific payload.
The UK will have the technical lead on the project and the instrumentation therefore will be assembled at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire. Dr Graham Turnock, the chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said: "It is thanks to the world-leading skills of our innovative space community that a UK-led consortium has been chosen to take forward the next ESA science mission. This demonstrates what a vital role we continue to play in European collaboration on research in space."
ARIEL is expected to observe at least 500-1,000 exoplanets, compared to 150-200 for the James Webb Space Telescope during its first five years. Two other European exoplanet missions, CHEOPS and PLATO, are scheduled to launch in 2018 and 2026 respectively.
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printed from SoylentNews, ESA Selects ARIEL Exoplanet Survey as a Medium Class Mission on 2024-04-19 16:14:45