CHEOPS Telescope: New Exoplanet Hunter Is Ready For Science!
253New Exoplanet Hunter CHEOPS Is Ready For Science!
From the mission itself, to the image that was captured, and more! Join me as we explore The next step in Earth-like Exoplanet discovery: Esa's CHEOPS Blurry Images!
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There are many space agencies out there in the world right now, and while many go on their own paths, many of them all try and find certain things to help us understand space and what's out there. For the ESA, the European Space Agency, they are following in NASA's (among others) footsteps and trying to find more Earth-like planets that might just be out there in the universe. And they're doing that mission via various probes and satellites and crafts.
The ESA’s exoplanet-observer Cheops acquired the first image of its initial target star, following the successful telescope cover opening on 29 January 2020. The intentionally blurry image is a product of the specially designed telescope optics, which are deliberately defocused to maximize the precision of Cheops’ measurements and enable its unprecedented study of exoplanets, or planets in other solar systems.
The acquisition of this image marks a key milestone in the extensive testing phase of Cheops, the Characterizing ExoPlanet Satellite, before it embarks on its mission to study planets around nearby stars.
“This is a defining moment for the mission,” says Nicola Rando, ESA project manager for Cheops.
“To the engineers and scientists across Europe who have worked and continue to work on Cheops, this image represents the culmination of many years of dedication and effort – designing, planning, coordinating and building this new and unique satellite.”
It's always good to see a new step taken in the "unveiling" of the universe via technology, as many upgraded satellites and probes have been launched in recent years to try and map out space even more, giving hope to many that we might just find another Earth, or at the very least, a place we can call home after a while.
The image that Cheops took features a stellar field centered on HD 70843, a yellow-white star located around 150 light years away. The team responsible for in-orbit commissioning of the satellite selected this star as the telescope’s first target because of its brightness and its location in the sky, which made it ideal for testing purposes.
After all, the last thing you'd want to do is go and monitor a particularly tricky star to observe because then it would skew the results and make you wonder if anything you're seeing is accurate. So by doing it this way and ensuring that all the system are functional and are within the designed parameters, you can go to the next step without issue.
“The first images that were about to appear on the screen were crucial for us to be able to determine if the telescope's optics had survived the rocket launch in good shape,” explains W|lly Benz, Principal Investigator of the Cheops mission consortium from the University of Bern, Switzerland. “When the first images of a field of stars appeared on the screen, it was immediately clear to everyone that we did indeed have a working telescope.
As noted earlier, the Cheops telescope deliberately delivers defocused images of a target star onto the detector – a charge-coupled device, or CCD – in order to distribute the light from each star over many pixels. This makes the measurements of starlight more precise, as they are much less sensitive to small differences in the response of individual pixels in the CCD and to variations in the telescope pointing.
That may seem and sound counter-intuitive, because in the realm of photography you want to have the cleanest and most detailed image possible, but in this case, blurrier is better. Especially since when you look at something in space via something like a telescope lens, it's not exactly accurate as light is traveling through space in order for you to see it, and thus, things can get distorted as the light travels. This is one of the reasons that people argue over the shape of the universe, because with all the light being emitted, it can change how you view said shape.
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Getting back to the topic at hand in terms of blurry images via Cheops. Having a precise measurement of the stars’ brightness and its variation is of critical importance to the scientists striving to learn as much as possible about the planets known to orbit those stars. A planet transiting in front of a star in Cheops’ view causes the star to dim – a barely detectable dip that can reveal key information about the planet’s properties, most importantly its size.
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