ARIEL
Logo for ARIEL
ARIEL
Mission Overview
ARIEL (Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey) will be devoted to observing spectroscopically in the infrared (IR) a large population (~500) of known transiting planets in our Galaxy, opening a new discovery space in the field of extrasolar planets and enabling the understanding of the physics and chemistry of these far away worlds.
ARIEL is based on a 1 meter-class telescope and a spectrometer covering the band from 1.95 to 7.8 micron, in addition to photometric bands in the visible and in the near-IR to monitor the stellar activity, measure the albedo and detect clouds. This will allow us to constrain models of their internal structure and improve our understanding of how planets form and evolve. During its 3.5 years operations from an L2 orbit ARIEL will continuously observe exoplanets transiting their host star.
Exoplanetary science is a key science topic of our department, and it is being expanded further. Interests include habitable planets, star-planet interactions and atmospheric evolution, as well as planetary system stability.
We are proposing to develop, under the lead of the UCL/RAL in Great Britain, a near-infrared (0.8-11 µm) spectrometer as a principal component of the payload.
Contribution of our Team
We will provide the flight software for the fine guidance sensor subsystem, a reuse of our CHEOPS developments. The hardware will be built by Poland. Further contributions will be made to the ground segment and to various aspects of the principal science work packages.
Involved Personnel
Management, Science Lead: M. Güdel, F. Kerschbaum
Development Lead: R. Ottensamer
Consortium: F. Kerschbaum, M. Güdel (Co-PI), A. Luntzer, R. Ottensamer
Contributions: WP lead "FGS Software": R. Ottensamer; WP Lead: "Stellar activity”: T. Rank-Lüftinger; WP "Science", "Science Ground Segment"
Important Milestones
Ariel was selected as M4 mission on March 20, 2018.
Mission adoption: Ariel has moved from study to implementation phase on November 12, 2020.
Launch Date: 2029
Funding
Links
More information on Ariel can be found here.