Overview of the DARWIN mission

Details Overview of the DARWIN mission Overview of the DARWIN mission

Oct 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003esasp.539..459k&link_type=abstract

In: Proceedings of the Conference on Towards Other Earths: DARWIN/TPF and the Search for Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets, 22-25 A

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Space Missions, Darwin, Extrasolar Planets

Scientific paper

The search for terrestrial extrasolar planets is a topic within the cosmic vision program of ESA. It involves a scope of different missions leading to DARWIN, an optical space nulling interferometer, with a foreseen launch in 2015. The ambitious mission objectives are: a) detection and analysis of planets orbiting nearby stars, searching for earth-like conditions and life and b) high resolution imaging by aperture synthesis. The detection problem is essentially a matter of contrast and dynamical range. Considering planets in the habitable zone (HZ), the star and planet will be very near each other on the sky while the star outshines the planet with up to 9 to 10 magnitudes in the visible and 6 to 7 magnitudes in the IR. The problem of how to find the dim planet next to a bright star will be solved by reducing the level of contrast by observing in the infrared and by using a technique known as Nulling Interferometry. Essentially the signals from the separate telescopes are combined such as to blank out the strong signal from the star and to show only the light coming from the regions around the star. The required rejection ratio to achieve the mission objectives is 105 over a band from 6μm to 18μm. The configurations of five and six telescopes were optimized on the basis of highest achievable modulation efficiency.

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