ESA has announced the launch interval for the CHEOPS mission
The CHEOPS telescope will be launched into space next October or November, the European Space Agency (ESA) has announced. CHEOPS will make observations of extrasolar planets orbiting nearby stars.
The launch of the CHEOPS (Characterizing Exoplanets Satellite) space telescope will take place from a spaceport located near the town of Kourou in French Guiana. The satellite will be launched by a Soyuz rocket. ESA has set the launch window from October 15 to November 14, 2019.
Ultimately, the observatory is to go into low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 700 kilometersów. Together with the CHEOPS telescope, a satellite that is part of the Italian Cosmo-SkyMed constellation will fly into space.
CHEOPS will take observations of stars in our cosmic neighborhood, o których we already know that they orbit wokół them planets. The actual target is the exoplanets in particularólarity in the magnitude range between Earth and Neptune.
Telescope’s ability to observe multiple transitsóin extrasolar planets against the background of their parent stars will allow scientists to obtain the precise transit signatures needed to measure the size of small planets. A combination of precise and accurate sizes of theów with masses determined from other measurementsów will be used to determine the density of planets, which in turn will allow prób to determine their composition and internal structure. These data, along with information about the parent stars and orbits of the planets, will provide key insights into the history of planet formation and evolution.
The satellite, whichóry recently completed an environmental test at ESA’s technical center in the Netherlands, is now undergoing final testing in Spain. ESA engineers hope to have CHEOPS mission ready early next year.
The CHEOPS telescope is among the small satellitesóin ESA-defined satellites „S-class”. The class assumes a hardware build time of no more than a few years. The budget for such missions is set at 50 millionóin the euro.
