Search for Habitable Worlds Joined by New European Space Telescope

Reported today on The New York Times

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Search for Habitable Worlds Joined by New European Space TelescopeThe Cheops orbiter will give a closer examination to stars already known to host exoplanets.The European Space Agency is continuing the search for new Earths this week with the launch of Cheops, a new telescope whose name stands for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite."Cheops will take exoplanet science to a whole new level," said Günther Hasinger, the agency's director of science.The spacecraft launched early on Wednesday morning aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. It was the second try after Tuesday's first launch attempt was delayed and some equipment was replaced. The satellite was lofted toward an unusual pole-to-pole orbit about 500 miles above Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope, by comparison, orbits about 350 miles above the surface, moving from west to east. In a clever bit of celestial engineering, Cheops will circle Earth just along the terminator, the division between day and night down below, with its camera permanently pointed away from the sun, toward the dark. Is Cheops different from other exoplanet hunters?Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the last three decades by ground-based astronomers like Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, of the University of Geneva, who were awarded the Nobel Prize this year, and by planet-hunting satellites like NASA's Kepler and TESS, as well as E.S.A.'s Corot. Dr. Queloz was in attendance at the launch.Rather than look for more planets, Cheops will study some that have already been discovered in order to understand them better.What will the Cheops mission try to accomplish?Many of the exoplanets already spotted by astronomers were discovered by observing the gravitational tug - or "wobble" - that they e

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