The CHEOPS (characterising exoplanet satellite) mission: telescope optical design, development status and main technical and programmatic challenges

Abstract

CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite) is the first ESA Small Mission as part of the ESA Cosmic Vision program 2015-2025 and it is planned launch readiness end of 2017. The mission lead is performed in a partnership between Switzerland, led by the University of Bern, and the European Space Agency with important contributions from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The CHEOPS mission will be the first space telescope dedicated to search for exoplanetary transits on bright stars already known to host planets by performing ultrahigh precision photometry on bright starts whose mass has been already estimated through spectroscopic surveys on ground based observations. The number of exoplanets in the mass range 1-30 MEarth for which both mass and radius are known with a good precision is extremely limited also considering the last two decades of high-precision radial velocity measurement campaigns and the highly successful space missions dedicated to exoplanets transit searches (CoRoT and Kepler).