Twinkle -- a small satellite spectroscopy mission for the next phase of exoplanet science
Abstract
With a focus on off-the-shelf components, Twinkle is the first in a series of cost competitive small satellites managed and financed by Blue Skies Space Ltd. The satellite is based on a high-heritage Airbus platform that will carry a 0.45 m telescope and a spectrometer which will provide simultaneous wavelength coverage from 0.5-4.5 . The spacecraft prime is Airbus Stevenage while the telescope is being developed by Airbus Toulouse and the spectrometer by ABB Canada. Scheduled to begin scientific operations in 2025, Twinkle will sit in a thermally-stable, sun-synchronous, low-Earth orbit. The mission has a designed operation lifetime of at least seven years and, during the first three years of operation, will conduct two large-scale survey programmes: one focused on Solar System objects and the other dedicated to extrasolar targets. Here we present an overview of the architecture of the mission, refinements in the design approach, and some of the key science themes of the extrasolar survey.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2209.03337,
title = {Twinkle -- a small satellite spectroscopy mission for the next phase of exoplanet science},
author = {Ian Stotesbury and Billy Edwards and Jean-Francois Lavigne and Vasco Pesquita and James J. Veilleux and Philip Windred and Ahmed Al-Refaie and Lawrence Bradley and Sushuang Ma and Giorgio Savini and Giovanna Tinetti and Til Birnstiel and Sally Dodson-Robinson and Barbara Ercolano and Dax Feliz and Scott Gaudi and Nina Hernitschek and Daniel Holdsworth and Ing-Guey Jiang and Matt Griffin and Nataliea Lowson and Karan Molaverdikhani and Hilding Neilson and Caprice Phillips and Thomas Preibisch and Subhajit Sarkar and Keivan G. Stassun and Derek Ward-Thompson and Duncan Wright and Ming Yang and Li-Chin Yeh and Ji-Lin Zhou and Richard Archer and Yoga Barrathwaj Raman Mohan and Max Joshua and Marcell Tessenyi and Jonathan Tennyson and Benjamin Wilcock},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.03337},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation 2022