Lecture 7 Flashcards
Describe the space mission life cycle in short. (4 stages)
Concept exploration
Detailed development
Production and deployment
Operations and support
What was Gaia?
Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group.
What were the instruments of Gaia?
Two identical optical telescopes/imaging systems, a radial velocity spectrometer and blue and red photometers.
What are some required fundamental parameters of the host star required to carry out comparative planetology? How can they be acquired?
Mass, Radius, Metallicity and age. Can be acquired through spectroscopy, photometry and stellar evolution theory.
What are the two scientific objectives of PLATO?
Exoplanet detection: PLATO shall detect and characterize exoplanets through the transit signature in front of the parent star.
Asteroseismology: PLATO shall measure seismic oscillations of the central stars of exoplanetary systems and other specific stars (simultaneous with exoplanet detection).
List some technical requirement challenges of PLATO.
Total wet mass at launch (2100kg)
Camera LoS stability
Temperature of the telescopes and their front-end electronics
Presence of the sun in camera FOV
What was the EUCLID mission?
Euclid will survey galaxies at a variety of distances from Earth, over an area of the sky covering more than 35 percent of the celestial sphere. Euclid seeks to answer a lot of questions about dark matter and structure of the universe.
Euclid seeks to answer a lot of questions about dark matter and structure of the universe. What methods (2) did Euclid use?
Weak gravitational lensing (Figure it out smartass) and Baryonic acoustic oscillations (Wiggle patters imprinted in galaxy clustering)
What was ARIEL?
Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey. Set out to perform a large-scale survey of a statistically well defined, diverse sample of about 1000 exoplanets and catalogue the planetary compositions and properties. (scheduled to launch 2029)
What was ATHENA?
Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics. Set out to Map hot gas structures and determine their physical properties searching for supermassive black holes. (Set to launch 2031)
What defines an L-class mission?
Large (L-class) missions are European-led flagship missions with a launch cadence of approximately one every decade. JUICE (L1), Athena (L2), and LISA (L3) have been selected within this category.
What defines an M-class mission?
Medium (M-class) missions may be ESA-led or carried out with international partners. These provide flexibility within the programme and have an expected launch cadence of two per decade. Current M missions are: Solar Orbiter (M1), Euclid (M2), PLATO (M3), Ariel (M4), and EnVision (M5).
