ESA Science & Technology - Exoplanets
Highlights
Highlights
A brief introduction to exoplanets
12 September 2018The first discoveries of exoplanets in the 1990s completely changed our perspective of the Solar System and opened up new areas of research that continues today. With the steady rise in the number and type of known exoplanets, there is a lot to learn as we move from an era of detecting planets around other stars to one of characterising them.
News
News
Exoplanet and cosmology discoveries awarded Nobel Prize in Physics
8 October 2019
ESA congratulates 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who have been awarded the prestigious prize for the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star, and James Peebles, honoured for the theoretical framework of cosmology used to investigate the Universe on its largest scales.
Hubble finds water vapour on habitable-zone exoplanet for the first time [heic1916]
11 September 2019
With data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, water vapour has been detected in the atmosphere of a super-Earth within the habitable zone by University College London (UCL) researchers in a world first.
CHEOPS passes final review before shipment to launch site
29 July 2019The Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, CHEOPS, has successfully passed the final analysis review for its launch on a Soyuz rocket from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
How CHEOPS will investigate planet-hosting stars
18 July 2019As launch approaches for ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, CHEOPS, scientists are rounding off the observing plans for the mission, with the science themes of the core programme announced recently and proposals for guest observations for the first year of CHEOPS operations under evaluation.
Delivery of first detectors for PLATO's exoplanet mission
11 April 2019The first batch of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, to be flown on ESA's PLATO space observatory was accepted by ESA last month. This is an important milestone on the road to creating a groundbreaking spacecraft that will detect Earth-sized exoplanets in orbit around nearby stars.
Construction of Europe's exoplanet hunter PLATO begins
4 October 2018The construction of ESA's PLATO mission to find and study planets beyond our Solar System will be led by Germany's OHB System AG as prime contractor, marking the start of the full industrial phase of the project.
Announcements
Announcements
CHEOPS Announcement of Opportunity (AO-1)
19 March 2019Proposals are solicited in response to the first Announcement of Opportunity - AO-1 - for observing time in the CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme. This AO covers the period February 2020 to January 2021. The deadline for proposals has passed.
Spacecraft Testing
Spacecraft Testing
#17: Practice makes perfect for CHEOPS inflight operations
25 June 2019It takes collaboration and teamwork to operate a spacecraft. As the CHEOPS launch approaches, a Europe-wide team is preparing to take control of inflight activities once the satellite is in space.
#16: CHEOPS is ready for flight
11 March 2019Recent months on the CHEOPS mission have seen the completion of spacecraft testing and the conclusion of a very important review, which determined that the satellite is ready to fly.
#15: A jigsaw falling into place: CHEOPS end-to-end testing complete
12 February 2019After a successful series of tests, the team that will operate the CHEOPS mission is ready for the activities to follow the satellite launch later this year.
#14: CHEOPS - withstanding the sound of launch and avoiding radio interference
17 October 2018For the CHEOPS mission, September was a busy month of acoustic noise testing and Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) testing at ESA's technical centre in the Netherlands.