Eddington mission

The Eddington mission was a European Space Agency project that would have searched for Earth-like planets by 2008. It was named for Arthur Eddington, a noted physicist who translated Einstein's work.

Using a single spacecraft with four telescopes in Earth orbit, Eddington would have examined different regions of the sky for intervals of about two months each. Observing more than 200,000 stars, it would measure changes in light of one part of one million, and thus allow astronomers to learn more about what stars are like inside.

The mission would have then searched for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, pointing continuously at one region of the sky for three years. It would measure light from more than 100,000 stars and detect the tiny decrease in light as a planet passes in front of a star. This so-called transit method will also be employed by NASA's Kepler mission.

Eddington was supposed to be the culmination of an international attempt to perform asteroseismology from space. Two small precursor space missions are currently underway. The French COROT mission is currently searching for other planets. Microvariability and Oscillations of STars (MOST) is a Canadian mission using a 15 cm telescope that was launched in 2003.

Launch

The launch vehicle was to have been a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was to have traveled beyond the Moon to the L2 Lagrangian point. It would have stayed there for the planned 5 year mission length. The launch mass was planned at 1640 kg.

ee also

*COROT
*Kepler mission
*Extrasolar planets
*Darwin Mission
*New Worlds Mission (NWM)
*Space Interferometry Mission (SIM)
*Spitzer Space Telescope (SST)
*Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF)

External links

* [http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120365_index_0_m.html ESA's Eddington mission page]