More than 50 institutes from 17 countries have been working over the past 5 years to develop the science goals and design the instrumentation. This will enable Ariel to survey a diverse sample of around 1000 planets outside our own solar system.
Professor Stephanie Werner, Co-PI in the Ariel Consortium from CEED, UiO is excited to be part of the mission:
– Ariel will provide a unique set of atmosphere observations of numerous exoplanet very different from those we know in the solar system. We will be able to probe the composition of these planets. Studying planetary systems in this detail will completely change the field of comparative planetology!
Ariel; further work begins now
The Ariel mission consortium teams from across Europe will now move on to build and prototype their designs for the payload of Ariel and plan for receiving and processing the data.
The industrial contractor for the spacecraft bus, which will support the payload coming from the nationally funded consortium teams, will be selected in the summer 2021.
More about the mission, the space telescope and instrumentation, and people behind read this CEEDs Blog; The European Space Agency formally adopts Ariel, the exoplanet explorer
Learn more:
Video: Ariel Space Mission Welcome to Ariel
What is an Exoplanet, how to build a space craft, and more ...