ESA Science & Technology - CHEOPS Focal Plane Module

CHEOPS will be the first mission dedicated to searching for exoplanetary transits by performing ultra-high-precision photometry on bright stars already known to host planets. It has one instrument – a photometer with a single CCD, operating between 0.4 µm and 1.05 µm, that is at the focal plane of an on-axis Ritchey-Chrétien telescope of 33 cm diameter.

The bronze-coloured Focal Plane Module (FPM), which houses the CCD detector array and the Front-End Electronics, is seen here mounted on the flat, black optical bench at the rear of the downward-pointing telescope tube (not seen). The FPM is the detector system that captures the image from the telescope.