The Eddington mission was a
European Space Agency
The European Space Agency (ESA) is a 23-member International organization, international organization devoted to space exploration. With its headquarters in Paris and a staff of around 2,547 people globally as of 2023, ESA was founded in 1975 ...
(ESA) project that planned to search for Earth-like planets, but was cancelled in 2003. It was named for the noted astronomer
Arthur Eddington
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the lu ...
, who formulated much of the modern theory of stellar atmospheres and stellar structure, popularized
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (14 March 187918 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence f ...
's work in the English language, carried out the first test (
gravitational lensing
A gravitational lens is matter, such as a galaxy cluster, cluster of galaxies or a point particle, that bends light from a distant source as it travels toward an observer. The amount of gravitational lensing is described by Albert Einstein's Ge ...
) of the
general theory of relativity
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity, and as Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physi ...
, and made original contributions to the theory. It was originally planned for operation in 2008, but was delayed. The ESA website now records its status as cancelled.
Overview
Using a single spacecraft in
Earth orbit Earth orbit may refer to:
* Earth's orbit, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun
* Low Earth orbit, an orbit around the Earth
* Geocentric orbit
A geocentric orbit, Earth-centered orbit, or Earth orbit involves any object orbiting Earth, such a ...
equipped with four telescopes, Eddington was to examine different regions of the sky for intervals of about two months each. The telescope would observe more than 500 000 stars for a possible transits and collect
asteroseismic data for 50 000 stars in a high temporal resolution.
The mission was then planned to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, pointing continuously at one region of the sky for three years. It would measure light from more than 100,000 stars and detect the tiny decrease in light as a planet passes in front of a star.
Eddington was advocated as the culmination of an international attempt to perform
asteroseismology
Asteroseismology is the study of oscillations in stars. Stars have many Resonance, resonant modes and frequencies, and the path of sound waves passing through a star depends on the local speed of sound, which in turn depends on local temperature a ...
from space. Two small precursor space missions have taken place. The French
COROT
CoRoT (French: ; English: Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) was a space telescope mission which operated from 2006 to 2013. The mission's two objectives were to search for extrasolar planets with short orbital periods, particularly t ...
mission (2006-2014) searched for other planets.
Microvariability and Oscillations of STars
The Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars/Microvariabilité et Oscillations STellaire (MOST), was Canada's first space telescope. Up until nearly 10 years after its launch it was also the smallest space telescope in orbit (for which its cre ...
(MOST, 2003-2019) was a Canadian mission using a 15 cm telescope.
Planned launch
The launch vehicle was to have been a
Soyuz-Fregat
Soyuz (, GRAU index: 11A511) is a family of Soviet and later Russian expendable medium-lift launch vehicles initially developed by the OKB-1 design bureau and manufactured by the Progress Rocket Space Centre factory in Samara, Russia. It hold ...
rocket from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome
The Baikonur Cosmodrome is a spaceport operated by Russia within Kazakhstan. Located in the Kazakh city of Baikonur, it is the largest operational space launch facility in terms of area. All Russian Human spaceflight, crewed spaceflights are l ...
. It was to have travelled beyond the
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It Orbit of the Moon, orbits around Earth at Lunar distance, an average distance of (; about 30 times Earth diameter, Earth's diameter). The Moon rotation, rotates, with a rotation period (lunar ...
to the
Lagrangian point
In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (; also Lagrangian points or libration points) are points of equilibrium (mechanics), equilibrium for small-mass objects under the gravity, gravitational influence of two massive orbit, orbiting b ...
. It would have stayed there for the planned 5-year mission length. The launch mass was planned at 1640 kg.
Expected performance
Eddington was to be a European counterpart to Kepler, expecting to detect thousands of planets of any size and a few tens of terrestrial planets that are potentially habitable.
Budget overruns with other ESA missions led to the cancellation of the mission in November 2003, despite strong protests from the scientific community.
See also
*
PLATO
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
*
Kepler space telescope
The Kepler space telescope is a defunct space telescope launched by NASA in 2009 to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orb ...
References
External links
ESA's Eddington mission overview page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eddington spacecraft
Cancelled spacecraft
European Space Agency space probes
Space telescopes
Exoplanet search projects