An updated study of potential targets for Ariel. (2019)
Keywords :
planets and satellites atmospheres - techniques: spectroscopic
Abstract:Ariel has been selected as ESA's M4 mission for launch in 2028 and is designed for the characterization of a large and diverse population of exoplanetary atmospheres to provide insights into planetary formation and evolution within our Galaxy. Here we present a study of Ariel's capability to observe currently known exoplanets and predicted Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discoveries. We use the Ariel radiometric model (ArielRad) to simulate the instrument performance and find that ~2000 of these planets have atmospheric signals which could be characterized by Ariel. This list of potential planets contains a diverse range of planetary and stellar parameters. From these we select an example mission reference sample (MRS), comprised of 1000 diverse
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Ariel has been selected as the next ESA medium-class science mission and
is due for launch in 2028. During its 4 yr mission, Ariel aims to observe
~1000 exoplanets ranging from Jupiters and Neptunes down to super-Earth
size in the visible and the infrared with its meter-class telescope. During
Phase A, the ESA radiometric model (Puig et al. 2015ExA....40..393P) was
utilized to assess the duration and type of observations needed to meet
the mission requirements. Although the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec)
instrument will also be used for spectroscopy, the mission requirements
are baselined on the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) channels, as these
bands are typically the most demanding. During Phase A, a study of Ariel's
capabilities to observe known and predicted planets was conducted and
a mission reference sample (MRS; i.e., a list of exoplanets to be observed
during the primary mission life) of ~1000 potential targets was created
(Zingales et al. 2018ExA....46...67Z). Planning of observations with Ariel
is based around a tiered approach. As envisaged in Phase A, a survey tier
aims to observe 1000 planets with low-resolution spectroscopy to produce
a statistically viable data set of a diverse range of exoplanetary
atmospheres.
Exoplanetary data was downloaded from NASA's Exoplanet Archive in order
to account for all confirmed planets before being filtered such that only
transiting planets were considered. The database was last accessed on
2019 February 26.
- J/ApJ/809/77 : Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) (Sullivan+, 2015)
- J/AJ/156/102 : The TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List
- J/ApJS/239/2 : Simulated exoplanets from TESS list of targets
