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Register a new userExpected performances of the Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS) II. The CHEOPS simulator
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The CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) is a mission dedicated to the search for exoplanetary transits through high precision photometry of bright stars already known to host planets. The telescope will provide the unique capability of determining accurate radii for planets whose masses have already been measured from ground-based spectroscopic surveys. This will allow a first-order characterisation of the planets internal structure through the determination of the bulk density, providing direct insight into their composition. The CHEOPS simulator has been developed to perform detailed simulations of the data which is to be received from the CHEOPS satellite. It generates accurately simulated images that can be used to explore design options and to test the on-ground data processing, in particular, the pipeline producing the photometric time series. It is, thus, a critical tool for estimating the photometric performance expected in flight and to guide photometric analysis. It can be used to prepare observations, consolidate the noise budget, and asses the performance of CHEOPS in realistic astrophysical fields that are difficult to reproduce in the laboratory. Images generated by CHEOPSim take account of many detailed effects, including variations of the incident signal flux and backgrounds, and detailed modelling of the satellite orbit, pointing jitter and telescope optics, as well as the CCD response, noise and readout. The simulator results presented in this paper have been used in the context of validating the data reduction processing chain, in which image time series generated by CHEOPSim were used to generate light curves for simulated planetary transits across real and simulated targets. Independent analysts were successfully able to detect the planets and measure their radii to an accuracy within the science requirements of the mission.
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The Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS) is a space mission designed to perform photometric observations of bright stars to obtain precise radii measurements of transiting planets. The high-precision photometry of CHEOPS relies on careful on-ground calibration of its payload. For that purpose, intensive pre-launch campaigns of measurements were carried out to calibrate the instrument and characterise its photometric performances. We report on main results of these campaigns, provide a complete analysis of data sets and estimate in-flight photometric performance by mean of end-to-end simulation. The on-ground photometric stability of the instrument is found to be of the order of 15 parts per million over 5 hours. Our end-to-end simulation shows that measurements of planet-to-star radii ratio with CHEOPS can be determined with a precision of 2% for a Neptune-size planet transiting a K-dwarf star and 5% for an Earth-size planet orbiting a Sun-like star. It corresponds to signal-to-noise ratios on the transit depths of 25 and 10 respectively, allowing the characterisation and detection of these planets. The pre-launch CHEOPS performances are shown to be compliant with the mission requirements.
The CHaracterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS), to be launched in December 2019, will detect and characterize small size exoplanets via ultra high precision photometry during transits. CHEOPS is designed as a follow-up telescope and therefore it will monitor a single target at a time. The scientific users will retrieve science-ready light curves of the target, automatically generated by the CHEOPS data reduction pipeline of the Science Operations Centre. This paper describes how the pipeline processes the series of raw images and, in particular, how it handles the specificities of CHEOPS data, such as the rotating field of view, the extended irregular Point Spread Function, and the data temporal gaps in the context of the strict photometric requirements of the mission. The current status and performance of the main processing stages of the pipeline, that is the calibration, correction and photometry, are presented to allow the users to understand how the science-ready data have been derived. Finally, the general performance of the pipeline is illustrated via the processing of representative scientific cases generated by the mission simulator.
The CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) was selected in 2012, as the first small mission in the ESA Science Programme and successfully launched in December 2019. CHEOPS is a partnership between ESA and Switzerland with important contributions by ten additional ESA Member States. CHEOPS is the first mission dedicated to search for transits of exoplanets using ultrahigh precision photometry on bright stars already known to host planets. As a follow-up mission, CHEOPS is mainly dedicated to improving, whenever possible, existing radii measurements or provide first accurate measurements for a subset of those planets for which the mass has already been estimated from ground-based spectroscopic surveys and to following phase curves. CHEOPS will provide prime targets for future spectroscopic atmospheric characterisation. Requirements on the photometric precision and stability have been derived for stars with magnitudes ranging from 6 to 12 in the V band. In particular, CHEOPS shall be able to detect Earth-size planets transiting G5 dwarf stars in the magnitude range between 6 and 9 by achieving a photometric precision of 20 ppm in 6 hours of integration. For K stars in the magnitude range between 9 and 12, CHEOPS shall be able to detect transiting Neptune-size planets achieving a photometric precision of 85 ppm in 3 hours of integration. This is achieved by using a single, frame-transfer, back-illuminated CCD detector at the focal plane assembly of a 33.5 cm diameter telescope. The 280 kg spacecraft has a pointing accuracy of about 1 arcsec rms and orbits on a sun-synchronous dusk-dawn orbit at 700 km altitude. The nominal mission lifetime is 3.5 years. During this period, 20% of the observing time is available to the community through a yearly call and a discretionary time programme managed by ESA.
Asteroseismology has been impressively boosted during the last decade mainly thanks to space missions such as Kepler/K2 and CoRoT. This has a large impact, in particular, in exoplanetary sciences since the accurate characterization of the exoplanets is convoluted in most cases with the characterization of their hosting star. Until the expected launch of the ESA mission PLATO 2.0, there is almost a decade where only two important missions will provide short-cadence high-precision photometric time-series: NASA--TESS and ESA--CHEOPS missions, both having high capabilities for exoplanetary sciences. In this work, we want to explore the asteroseismic potential of CHEOPS time-series. Following the works done for estimating the asteroseismic potential of Kepler and TESS, we have analyzed the probability of detecting solar-like pulsations using CHEOPS light-curves. Since CHEOPS will collect runs with observational times from hours up to a few days, we have analyzed the accuracy and precision we can obtain for the estimation of nu_max, the only asteroseismic observable we can recover using CHEOPS observations. Finally, we have analyzed the impact of knowing nu_max in the characterization of exoplanet host stars. Using CHEOPS light-curves with the expected observational times we can determine nu_max for massive G and F-type stars from late Main Sequence on, and for F, G, and K-type stars from post-Main Sequence on with an uncertainty lower than a 5%. For magnitudes V<12 and observational times from eight hours up to two days, the HR zone of potential detectability changes. The determination of nu_max leads to an internal age uncertainty reduction in the characterization of exoplanet host stars from 52% to 38%; mass uncertainty reduction from 2.1% to 1.8%; radius uncertainty reduction from 1.8% to 1.6%; density uncertainty reduction from 5.6% to 4.7%, in our best scenarios.
A new generation of exoplanet research beckons and with it the need for simulation tools that accurately predict signal and noise in transit spectroscopy observations. We developed ExoSim: an end-to-end simulator that models noise and systematics in a dynamical simulation. ExoSim improves on previous simulators in the complexity of its simulation, versatility of use and its ability to be generically applied to different instruments. It performs a dynamical simulation that can capture temporal effects, such as correlated noise and systematics on the light curve. It has also been extensively validated, including against real results from the Hubble WFC3 instrument. We find ExoSim is accurate to within 5% in most comparisons. ExoSim can interact with other models which simulate specific time-dependent processes. A dedicated star spot simulator allows ExoSim to produce simulated observations that include spot and facula contamination. ExoSim has been used extensively in the Phase A and B design studies of the ARIEL mission, and has many potential applications in the field of transit spectroscopy.
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