PLATO and CHEOPS are two European Space Agency missions aimed at characterising exoplanets. CHEOPS is an S-class mission (small mission in ESA’s science program) which aims to characterise exoplanets already known to be orbiting around nearby bright stars. CHEOPS will target Earth- to Neptune-sized planets. PLATO is an M-class mission (medium size mission) aimed at finding terrestrial exoplanets in orbits out to the habitable zone (HZ) of solar-type stars …
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Apr 2019
High resolution up-to-date images of the PLATO exoplanet mission are hard to find. I’ll collect high resolution PLATO images here as I come across them. Download Image3500 x 2121 pixels, 3.6 MBCopyright: OHB System AGCredit: OHB System AG
One of the key scientific goals of PLATO is to detect terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone (HZ) of solar-type stars (up to orbits of one year), and characterise their bulk properties to determine their habitability. Earth remains the only known example where life has successfully emerged, and we can’t yet say what conditions are most suitable for life. We use the HZ as a tool to determine which …
The PLATO mission will monitor the brightness variations of more than 200,000 stars to look for planets which transit their host stars. TESS will also utilise the transit technique to focus on targeting bright host stars, to look for Earth-sized planets. It is thus not surprising when people end up thinking: why launch two space-based exoplanet spacecraft to look for Earth-sized planets? The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched …