TWINKLE: A BRITISH MISSION TO EXPLORE EXOPLANETSTwinkle, a bold and pioneering British mission, will observe more than one hundred known exoplanets and will unveil their weather, history and the chemical composition of their atmosphere.
EnVision is a planetary orbiter mission competing for the European Space Agency's 2025 launch opportunity. It will accomplish revolutionary surface, interior and atmospheric science to determine the nature and rate of change caused by geological and atmospheric processes. The incredible data harvest will allow us to understand why Venus has evolved so differently from Earth despite their apparent sister-planet characteristics.
Main Belt Comets (MBCs), a type of Active Asteroid, constitute a newly identified class of solar system objects. They have stable, asteroid-like orbits and some exhibit a recurrent comet-like appearance. It is believed that they survived the age of the solar system in a dormant state and that their current ice sublimation driven activity only began recently. Buried water ice is the only volatile expected to survive under an insulating surface. Excavation by an impact can expose the ice and trigger the start of MBC activity. We present the case for a mission to one of these objects, to be submitted to the European Space Agency’s current call for an M-class mission.
FARSIDE is a mission to the farside of the moon that consists of a lander and an instrumented relay satellite. The lander will make pioneering radio astronomy, geophysical, and geochemical measurements from the interior of the 2000-km diameter South Pole-Aitken basin. From a relay satellite at the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point, the surface will be monitored for impact-generated light flashes, and synergistic radio and magnetic measurements will be obtained.
In the frame of the M4 Cosmic Vision ESA call, low frequency and high frequency radar is also proposed for the Castalia mission to a Main Belt Comet, for Marco Polo 2D to a D-type asteroid and for PhobEx to Phobos.
The Hera Saturn entry probe mission is proposed as an M-class mission led by ESA with a significant contribution from NASA. It consists of one atmospheric probe to be sent into the atmosphere of Saturn, and a Carrier-Relay spacecraft. Hera will perform in situ measurements of the chemical and isotopic compositions as well as the dynamics of Saturn’s atmosphere using a single probe, with the goal of improving our understanding of the origin, formation, and evolution of Saturn, the giant planets and their satellite systems, with extrapolation to extrasolar planets. Hera will probe well into the cloud-forming region of the troposphere, below the region accessible to remote sensing, to the locations where certain cosmogenically abundant species are expected to be well mixed.
COrE+ is an ambitious CMB mission with a science program that will complement the achievements of the Planck satellite. A primary objective of the mission will be to investigate the physics of inflation and to constrain the inflation potential through precise measurements of the CMB polarization B-modes.
During the formation and the entire life of stars and planets, several physical processes, in particular magnetic fields and winds, influence their dynamics, and thus impact their evolution. These processes directly impact the internal structure of stars, the transport of angular momentum, and of course the direct circumstellar environment. They thus drive not only stellar evolution, but also the formation and fate of planets surrounding the stars and the emergence of life. We propose to follow the life cycle of matter, from the interstellar medium to the surface of stars and the edge of the stellar systems, and thus to study the formation, structure, evolution, and 3D dynamic environment of all types of stars and their planets. This will be done through the use of a high-resolution spectropolarimeter working in both the UV and visible wavelength domains attached to a 1.3 meter telescope.
The Theia mission will explore the Universe at unprecedented astrometric precision of 0.3µas over a field of about 1 degree. Theia is the divinity of sight and daughter of Gaia. Similarly, the instrument concept carries on the heritage of HIPPARCOS and Gaia missions combined to latest developments in precision metrology control. While giant telescopes and other observatories will do wonders in spectroscopy, imaging, photometry, etc. Theia will enable science cases unique to µas astrometry, a precision that will reveal the Universe in motion like Earth-like planets orbiting around our immediate stellar neighbors, the activity of the most extreme objects known (black holes and neutron stars) and unveil the local sub-structure of the dark matter halo in which the Milky Way resides. Conceived as an open observatory class mission, Theia will bring ultra-precise astrometry to the broader community, including target-of-opportunity science in the era of Extremely Large Telescopes.