ESA Science & Technology - Call for declaration of Interest in Science Instrumentation - Cosmic Vision Mission: Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory (EChO)

Through this Call, ESA is soliciting proposals to study the complete science instrument (telescope and Fine Guidance Sensor excluded) as defined in the EChO Payload Definition Document (PDD), including any active cryo-cooling chain required. The PDD is included in the Call documentation.

The primary goal of the instrument studies is to reach a technical definition of the instrument that is sufficiently advanced for enabling a reliable development risk evaluation and a preliminary cost evaluation. It is generally recommended to focus the study in particular on critical and new elements.

The study team shall be an ESA Member State science institute or a consortium of such institutes. European industry can be involved in the study team. In that case, the proposal will be subject to a harmonisation process at ESA to avoid duplication of tasks that could already be addressed by the same industrial companies in ESA system studies.

The final selection of instrument assessment studies will be made by ESA, after consultation, if necessary, with the relevant Member States that would potentially fund the studies, based on technical relevance and programmatic constraints.

The studies will be nationally funded, in line with the general approach on the science payload studies and development that is described in the document SPC(2008)3, which is included in the Call documentation. Although this SPC paper refers to M1/M2 missions, the general approach described will also be followed for the M3 missions under study.

Documentation

All documents that are included in this Call are available for download under the "documentation" section in the right-hand menu. They are:

• The Call document, with full details of this Call
• SPC(2008)3, "National Activities Parallel to The Cosmic Vision Studies"
• The EChO Payload Definition Document (PDD), including general instrument accommodation constraints and the ESA reference payload design, along with the related optical files
• The EChO Science Requirements Document (SciRD)
• Information on the preliminary spacecraft design performed during the June/July 2011 Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) study of EChO
• The initial EChO mission science proposal, as submitted in response to the CV Call.
  This document is given as background information only. The technical solutions presented in this document as well as programmatic aspects are not necessarily representative of the latest mission design.

Proposal submission

Please ensure that the content of your proposal meets the requirements as defined in the Call document, which is provided in the documentation.

The proposal shall be a single PDF, and no larger in size than 20 MB.
It shall be submitted using the online submission form that is accessible through the link below, or in the right-hand menu (the form opens in a new window).

The study proposal team is requested to also send a copy of the proposal to the relevant Member States delegations.

The proposal submission deadline is 4 November 2011, at 14:00 CET.

The direct link to this Call web page is: http://sci.esa.int/echo-doi2011

Contact

For further information, please contact

C.P. Escoubet
Acting Solar System Missions Coordinator
Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration, ESA, The Netherlands
email: Philippe.Escoubetesa.int