Small Satellite, Big Mission

摘要

The European Space Agency has signed off on a new mission to study extrasolar planets orbiting nearby bright stars. The Characterizing Exoplanets Satellite (Cheops), expected to launch in 2017, will focus on studying known exoplanets rather than finding new ones. The green light for Cheops, approved last week, is good news for European astronomers whose earlier proposals for an exo-planet mission never got funded. A proposed exoplanet-detecting spacecraft known as Eddington was left stranded on paper in the early 2000s.