ARIEL selected as next M4 mission by the ESA Space Programme Committee

In the last years the number of known exoplanets has grown quickly thanks to missions such as Kepler and CoRoT and instruments such as HARPS-N, mounted on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, which are designed to identify exoplanets with the method of transits or radial velocity. We have understood now that the presence of exoplanets is a common features in stars of the Milky Way, and that the architecture of exoplanetary systems can be very different than the one of the Solar System.

 

In the next years the study of exoplanets will go beyond their identification, with the aim of unveiling their physical properties such as the chemical composition of their atmosphere. This will be possible also thanks to the mission ARIEL  (Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey), which has been selected by the Space Programme Committee of the European Space Agency as next M4 mission.

 

ARIEL will be launched in 2028 and its mission will be 4 years long. It main objective will be the analysis of  the chemical composition of more than 1000 exoplanets, mainly Jupiters- and Neptune-like planets, with some super-Earth. The planets selected as targets orbit around stars with different characteristics, in order to understand how the environment where planets form affects their properties and evolution. ARIEL will be equipped with an innovative mirror with 1 meter of diameter, designed and built in Italy, and optical systems capable of spectroscopic observations at average resolution.

 

The ARIEL consortium numbers more than 50 institutes spread over 15 nations, with a large involvement of the Italian community and in particular of the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo. One of the co-principal investigators leading the Italian research team is in fact Giusi Micela (INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Palermo).  Besides, astronomers of the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo are already involved in ARIEL: Ignazio Pillitteri (OAPA researcher) and Tiziano Zingales (Ph.D. student of OAPA and University College of London) working on targets selection; Antonino Petralia (OAPA post-doc) which is selecting stellar calibrators; and Jesus Maldonado (OAPA researcher) which is studying how stellar activity affects the diagnostics of chemical composition that will be observed by ARIEL. Other Italian institutes involved in ARIEL are the Italian Space Agency, The Universities of Florence and Rome, and the National Research Council.