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The CHEOPS mission
Guterman, P.; Alonso, R.; Deleuil, M. +107 more
The CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) was selected on October 19, 2012, as the first small mission (S-mission) in the ESA Science Programme and successfully launched on December 18, 2019, as a secondary passenger on a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. CHEOPS is a partnership between ESA and Switzerland with important contri…
All-sky visible and near infrared space astrometry
Tanga, Paolo; Ting, Yuan-Sen; Zwitter, Tomaž +27 more
The era of all-sky space astrometry began with the Hipparcos mission in 1989 and provided the first very accurate catalogue of apparent magnitudes, positions, parallaxes and proper motions of 120 000 bright stars at the milliarcsec (or milliarcsec per year) accuracy level. Hipparcos has now been superseded by the results of the Gaia mission. The s…
Faint objects in motion: the new frontier of high precision astrometry
Villaver, Eva; Alves, João; Chemin, Laurent +83 more
Sky survey telescopes and powerful targeted telescopes play complementary roles in astronomy. In order to investigate the nature and characteristics of the motions of very faint objects, a flexibly-pointed instrument capable of high astrometric accuracy is an ideal complement to current astrometric surveys and a unique tool for precision astrophys…
MeerCRAB: MeerLICHT classification of real and bogus transients using deep learning
Paterson, Kerry; Körding, Elmar; Woudt, Patrick +13 more
Astronomers require efficient automated detection and classification pipelines when conducting large-scale surveys of the (optical) sky for variable and transient sources. Such pipelines are fundamentally important, as they permit rapid follow-up and analysis of those detections most likely to be of scientific value. We therefore present a deep le…
Chronos - take the pulse of our galactic neighbourhood
Famaey, Benoit; Katz, David; Haywood, Misha +15 more
Understanding our Galaxy's structure, formation, and evolution will, over the next decades, continue to benefit from the wonderful large survey by Gaia, for astrometric, kinematic, and spectroscopic characterization, and by large spectroscopic surveys for chemical characterization. The weak link for full exploitation of these data is age character…