The Extreme-ultraviolet Stellar Characterization for Atmospheric Physics and Evolution (ESCAPE) mission is an astrophysics Small Explorer employing ultraviolet spectroscopy (EUV: 80 to 825 Å and FUV: 1280 to 1650 Å) to explore the high-energy radiation environment in the habitable zones around nearby stars. ESCAPE provides the first comprehensive study of the stellar EUV and coronal mass ejection environments that directly impact the habitability of rocky exoplanets. In a 20-month science mission, ESCAPE will provide the essential stellar characterization to identify exoplanetary systems most conducive to habitability and provide a roadmap for NASA’s future life-finder missions. ESCAPE accomplishes this goal with roughly two-order-of-magnitude gains in EUV efficiency over previous missions. ESCAPE employs a grazing incidence telescope that feeds an EUV and FUV spectrograph. The ESCAPE science instrument builds on previous ultraviolet and x-ray instrumentation, grazing incidence optical systems, and photon-counting ultraviolet detectors used on NASA astrophysics, heliophysics, and planetary science missions. The ESCAPE spacecraft bus is the versatile and high-heritage Ball Aerospace BCP-Small spacecraft. Data archives will be housed at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.
The Extreme-ultraviolet Stellar Characterization for Atmospheric Physics and Evolution (ESCAPE) mission is an astrophysics Small Explorer employing ultraviolet spectroscopy (EUV: 80 - 825 Å and FUV: 1280 - 1650 Å) to explore the high-energy radiation environment in the habitable zones around nearby stars. ESCAPE provides the first comprehensive study of the stellar EUV and coronal mass ejection environments which directly impact the habitability of rocky exoplanets. In a 20 month science mission, ESCAPE will provide the essential stellar characterization to identify exoplanetary systems most conducive to habitability and provide a roadmap for NASA's future life-finder missions. ESCAPE accomplishes this goal with roughly two-order-of-magnitude gains in EUV efficiency over previous missions. ESCAPE employs a grazing incidence telescope that feeds an EUV and FUV spectrograph. The ESCAPE science instrument builds on previous ultraviolet and X-ray instrumentation, grazing incidence optical systems, and photon-counting ultraviolet detectors used on NASA astrophysics, heliophysics, and planetary science missions. The ESCAPE spacecraft bus is the versatile and high-heritage Ball Aerospace BCP-Small spacecraft. Data archives will be housed at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). ESCAPE is currently completing a NASA Phase A study, and if selected for Phase B development would launch in 2025.
The Extreme-ultraviolet Stellar Characterization for Atmospheric Physics and Evolution (ESCAPE) mission is an astrophysics Small Explorer employing ultraviolet spectroscopy (EUV: 80 – 825 Å and FUV: 1280 – 1650 Å) to explore the high-energy radiation environment in the habitable zones around nearby stars. ESCAPE provides the first comprehensive study of the stellar EUV and coronal mass ejection environments which directly impact the habitability of rocky exoplanets. In a 21 month science mission, ESCAPE will provide the essential stellar characterization to identify exoplanetary systems most conducive to habitability and provide a roadmap for future life-finder missions. ESCAPE accomplishes this goal with roughly two-order-of-magnitude gains in EUV efficiency over previous missions. ESCAPE employs a grazing incidence telescope that feeds an EUV and FUV spectrograph, building on experience with ultraviolet and X-ray instrumentation, grazing incidence optical systems, and photon-counting ultraviolet detectors. The instrument builds on design and hardware heritage from numerous NASA UV astrophysics, heliophysics, and planetary science missions. The ESCAPE spacecraft bus is the versatile and high-heritage Ball Aerospace BCP-Smallspacecraft. Data archives are housed at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST).
The long-term stability of exoplanetary atmospheres depends critically on the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) flux from the host star. The EUV flux likely controls the demographics of the short-period planet population as well the ability for rocky planets to maintain habitable environments long enough for the emergence of life. We present the Extreme-ultraviolet Stellar Characterization for Atmospheric Physics and Evolution (ESCAPE) mission, an astrophysics Small Explorer proposed to NASA. ESCAPE employs extreme- and far-ultraviolet spectroscopy (70 - 1800 Α) to characterize the highenergy radiation environment in the habitable zones (HZs) around nearby stars. ESCAPE provides the first comprehensive study of the stellar EUV environments that control atmospheric mass-loss and determine the habitability of rocky exoplanets. The ESCAPE instrument comprises an EUV grazing incidence telescope feeding four diffraction gratings and a photon-counting detector. The telescope is 50 cm diameter with four nested parabolic primary mirrors and four nested elliptical secondary mirrors, fabricated and aligned by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The off-plane grating assemblies are fabricated at Pennsylvania State University and the ESCAPE detector system is a micro-channel plate (MCP; 125mm x 40mm active area) sensor developed by the University of California, Berkeley. ESCAPE employs the versatile and high-heritage Ball Aerospace BCP-100 spacecraft.
The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a 6U NASA CubeSat carrying on board a low-resolution (R ∼ 2000 to 3000), near-UV (2500 to 3300 Å) spectrograph. It has a rectangular primary Cassegrain telescope to maximize the collecting area. CUTE, which is planned for launch in spring 2020, is designed to monitor transiting extra-solar planets orbiting bright, nearby stars, aiming at improving our understanding of planet atmospheric escape and star–planet interaction processes. We present here the CUTE data simulator, which we complemented with a basic data reduction pipeline. This pipeline will be then updated once the final CUTE data reduction pipeline is developed. We show here the application of the simulator to the HD209458 system and a first estimate of the precision on the measurement of the transit depth as a function of temperature and magnitude of the host star. We also present estimates of the effect of spacecraft jitter on the final spectral resolution. The simulator has been developed considering also scalability and adaptability to other missions carrying on board a long-slit spectrograph. The data simulator will be used to inform the CUTE target selection, choose the spacecraft and instrument settings for each observation, and construct synthetic CUTE wavelength-dependent transit light curves on which to develop the CUTE data reduction pipeline.
The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a near-UV (NUV), 6U CubeSat designed to characterize the interaction between exoplanetary atmospheres and their host stars. CUTE is dedicated to observing multiple transits of short period planets with a range of masses to measure the transit depths of atomic and molecular nearUV features. These observations will enable us to quantify as a function of wavelength the transit ingress, egress, and depth of exoplanet light curves in order to determine the presence of bow shocks and strong atmospheric mass loss. The CUTE optical system combines a novel rectangular Cassegrain telescope and a holographically-ruled, aberration-correcting diffraction grating. The high-throughput optical system is projected to obtain an average effective area of ≈24 cm2 , comparable to previous Explorer class missions (GALEX) in a CubeSat package. This proceeding provides an overview of the science motivation, the final telescope and spacecraft design, and an outline of the mission operation.
POLLUX is a high-resolution, UV spectropolarimeter proposed for the 15-meter primary mirror option of LUVOIR1 . The instrument Phase 0 study is supported by the French Space Agency (CNES) and performed by a consortium of European scientists. POLLUX has been designed to deliver high-resolution spectroscopy (R ≥ 120,000) over a broad spectral range (90-390 nm). Its unique spectropolarimetric capabilities will open-up a vast new parameter space, in particular in the unexplored UV domain and in a regime where high-resolution observations with current facilities in the visible domain are severely photon starved. POLLUX will address a range of questions at the core of the LUVOIR Science portfolio. The combination of high resolution and broad coverage of the UV bandpass will resolve narrow UV emission and absorption lines originating in diffuse media, thus permitting the study of the baryon cycle over cosmic time: from galaxies forming stars out of interstellar gas and grains, and stars forming planets, to the various forms of feedback into the interstellar and intergalactic medium (ISM and IGM), and active galactic nuclei (AGN). UV circular and linear polarimetry will reveal the magnetic fields for a wide variety of objects for the first time, from AGN outflows to a diverse range of stars, stellar explosions (both supernovae and their remnants), the ISM and IGM. It will enable detection of polarized light reflected from exoplanets (or their circumplanetary material and moons), characterization of the magnetospheres of stars and planets (and their interactions), and measurements of the influence of magnetic fields at the (inter)galactic scale. In this paper, we outline the key science cases of POLLUX, together with its high-level technical requirements. The instrument design, its estimated performances, and the required technology development are presented in a separated proceeding2 .
The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a 6U NASA CubeSat carrying a low-resolution (R ≈ 3000), near-ultraviolet (255 – 330 nm) spectrograph fed by a rectangular primary Cassegrain. CUTE, is planned for launch in spring 2020 and it will monitor transiting extra-solar planets to study atmospheric escape. We present here the CUTE data simulator, which is a versatile tool easily adaptable to any other mission performing singleslit spectroscopy and carrying on-board a CCD detector. We complemented the data simulator with a data reduction pipeline capable of performing a rough reduction of the simulated data. This pipeline will then be updated once the final CUTE data reduction pipeline will be fully developed. We further briefly discuss our plans for the development of a CUTE data reduction pipeline. The data simulator will be used to inform the target selection, improve the preliminary signal-to-noise calculator, test the impact on the data of deviations from the nominal instrument characteristics, identify the best spacecraft orientation for the observation of each target and construct synthetic data to train the science team in the data analysis prior to launch.
The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a near-UV (2550 to 3300 Å) 6U CubeSat mission designed to monitor transiting hot Jupiters to quantify their atmospheric mass loss and magnetic fields. CUTE will probe both atomic (Mg and Fe) and molecular (OH) lines for evidence of enhanced transit absorption, and to search for evidence of early ingress due to bow shocks ahead of the planet’s orbital motion. As a dedicated mission, CUTE will observe ≳100 spectroscopic transits of hot Jupiters over a nominal 7-month mission. This represents the equivalent of >700 orbits of the only other instrument capable of these measurements, the Hubble Space Telescope. CUTE efficiently utilizes the available CubeSat volume by means of an innovative optical design to achieve a projected effective area of ∼28 cm2, low instrumental background, and a spectral resolving power of R∼3000 over the primary science bandpass. These performance characteristics enable CUTE to discern transit depths between 0.1% and 1% in individual spectral absorption lines. We present the CUTE optical and mechanical design, a summary of the science motivation and expected results, and an overview of the projected fabrication, calibration, and launch timeline.
The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a near-UV (2550 - 3300 Å) 6U cubesat mission designed to monitor transiting hot Jupiters to quantify their atmospheric mass loss and magnetic fields. CUTE will probe both atomic (Mg and Fe) and molecular (OH) lines for evidence of enhanced transit absorption, and to search for evidence of early ingress due to bow shocks ahead of the planet’s orbital motion. As a dedicated mission, CUTE will observe ⪆ 60 spectroscopic transits of hot Jupiters over a nominal seven month mission. This represents the equivalent of > 700 orbits of the only other instrument capable of these measurements, the Hubble Space Telescope. CUTE efficiently utilizes the available cubesat volume by means of an innovative optical design to achieve a projected effective area of ∼ 22 cm2 , low instrumental background, and a spectral resolving power of R ∼ 3000 over the entire science bandpass. These performance characteristics enable CUTE to discern a transit depth of ⪅1% in individual spectral absorption lines. We present the CUTE optical and mechanical design, a summary of the science motivation and expected results, and an overview of the projected fabrication, calibration and launch timeline.
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