Beyond Kepler
The end of Kepler signals the beginning of a new era in planet hunting
“New missions will build on Kepler’s discoveries, including the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope,” says Dr Paul Hertz, NASA’s astrophysics division director.
The former is already in position; unlike Kepler, which observed 1/400th of the sky over a period of four years, TESS will study nearly the entire sky, monitoring different sections for 27 days at a time, with smaller fractions of the sky being observed for up to a year. Expectations are that TESS will catalogue more than 1,500 transiting exoplanet candidates, including rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.
CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), a joint project between the European Space Agency and the Swiss Space Office, is expected to launch later this year. Essentially a follow-up to Kepler, CHEOPS will provide far more accurate measurements of known Earth-to-Neptune-sized exoplanets. ESA’s PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) will follow in 2026, again with an emphasis on detecting potentially habitable worlds.
Unlike these missions, the longawaited NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope – now set to launch in 2021 – will observe the Universe in the infrared. The advantage of this is that it will provide clearer spectroscopic information on the make-up of the exoplanets’ atmospheres.