Searching and Characterizing Exoplanets with CHEOPS, ARIEL, and PLATO

SETI Talks

Tags: SETI Talks, Astronomy

Time: Wednesday, Sep 16, 2020 -

Location: Online

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Important note: This month’s SETI Talks will be held at a different time of day than usual (11AM PDT) to accommodate time zone differences for our speakers who will be joining us from Europe.

NASA’s Kepler mission and its successor TESS are not the only space telescopes dedicated to finding exoplanets. The European Space Agency (ESA) has embarked on the challenge of finding and characterizing those planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun. We’ll discuss several of these missions in this special SETI Talks with leading European-based astronomers.

The CHEOPS mission (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite) is the first of the newly created “S-class missions” (small class missions with an ESA budget of less than 50 million), and its goal is to characterize exoplanet transits. The mission recently reached a new milestone and has been declared ready for science. The space telescope targets stars known to have a transiting exoplanet and focuses on better characterizing Earth-like and super-Earth exoplanets. Willy Benz, Professor at the Physics Institute at the University of Bern and Principal Investigator of CHEOPS, will tell us about the mission and its goals. 

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is the third medium-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision program. Its objective is to find and study a large number of extrasolar planetary systems, with an emphasis on the properties of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone around solar-like stars. PLATO will carry out high precision, long (months to years), uninterrupted photometric monitoring of terrestrial exoplanets to characterize their bulk properties, including planets in Sun-like habitable zone stars. Heike Rauer, principal investigator of PLATO, will tell us how the mission could discover terrestrial exoplanets, some in the habitable zone of solar-type stars, and characterize them. Such analysis will pave the way for future missions that could one day image another Pale Blue Dot.

ARIEL (Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey) aims to answer fundamental questions about how planetary systems form and evolve. ESA has selected it as its next medium-class science mission, due for launch in 2028. During its 4-year mission, ARIEL will observe more than 500 exoplanets ranging from Jupiter- and Neptune-size down to super-Earths in various environments. We invited Giovanna Tinetti, Head of the Astrophysics Group, UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy and Principal Investigator of ARIEL, to discuss this mission’s future goals and the technological challenges of building a mission capable of analyzing the light of exoplanets with transits.

These researchers will tell us about their missions and what to expect in the coming years from the highly accurate, and multi-color, transiting light curves provided by those space telescopes. They'll also discuss ESA's future contributions in discovering and characterizing exoplanets to better understand the formation of planetary systems and enable planetary science far beyond the Solar System's boundaries.

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Willy Benz

Willy Benz studied physics in Switzerland at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Geneva. He then went on to post-doctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) and at Harvard University (USA), where he was appointed assistant and subsequently associate professor. In 1991, he joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson (USA) as a full professor.

In 1997, he returned to Switzerland as a professor at the Physics Institute at the University of Bern, where he was the director between 2002 and 2015. Currently, he is the Director of the Swiss National Center “PlanetS” dedicated to studying the formation, evolution, and characterization of planets. He is also the Principal Investigator of CHEOPS, the first small mission in ESA’s scientific programme launched in December 2019. Since 2007 he is an external scientific member of the Max Planck Society in Germany.

He has served on many national and international committees. He chaired The European Space Agency (ESA) Space Science Advisory Committee and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Science and Technical Committee. In 2018, he was elected president of the ESO Council.

Giovanna Tinetti

Professor Giovanna Tinetti is Head of the Astrophysics Group, UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy, and Director of the UCL Centre for Space Exochemistry Data at Harwell.

She is the Principal Investigator of Ariel, the European Space Agency's next medium-class (M4) science mission to be launched in 2028. She is also co-founder and co-director of Blue Skies Space Ltd, which aims at creating new opportunities for science space satellites.

Select appointments and achievements include Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded program Exo-Lights (2014-2019), and Institute of Physics Moseley medal 2011.

Awarded a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Turin in Italy, Giovanna Tinetti has continued her academic career as NASA Astrobiology Institute fellow at Caltech/JPL and then as European Space Agency external fellow in Paris, before moving to UCL in 2007 as STFC Aurora and then Royal Society URF Fellow.

Prof. Tinetti has authored / co-authored over 180 research papers and has delivered over 260 talks, seminars and public lectures internationally.

Heike Rauer

Professor Heike Rauer is director of the Institute of Planetary Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and professor for planetology at the Free University of Berlin. 

She earned her degree in Physics from the University of Hannover in 1986 and completed a doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1991 with research work on cometary plasma tails performed at the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy. Awarded a research fellowship by the European Space Agency (ESA), she worked at the Observatoire de Paris – Meudon from 1995 to 1997. During her subsequent period at DLR, Heike Rauer completed her post-doctoral qualification (Habilitation) at the Technical University of Berlin in 2004, where she became a professor for Planetary Physics at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, in parallel to heading the department of Extrasolar Planets and Atmospheres at the DLR Planetary Research Institute. She moved to the Department of Geosciences at the Free University of Berlin in November 2017, where she specialised in planetology, in conjunction with the new position as director of the DLR Institute of Planetary Research.

She was member of the science council of the French-European mission CoRoT, the first mission dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets. Since 2013, Rauer has been PI of the instrument consortium for the ESA space telescope PLATO, which will survey the Milky Way for planets, in particular Earth-like planets, from 2026. She is Co-PI of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), a network of 12 automatically operating telescopes that search for exoplanets at Paranal Observatory, which is part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. She coordinates a German-wide research network on the diversity of extrasolar planets (DFG SPP 1992) since 2018.