Cosmic Vision
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The Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 is ESA's roadmap for scientific space based missions.
The initial call of ideas and concepts was launched in 2004 with a subsequent workshop held in Paris to define more fully the themes of the Vision under the broader headings of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Solar System Exploration and Fundamental Physics.
By early 2006 the formulation for a 10-year plan based around 4 key questions emerged:
- What are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life?
- How does the Solar System work?
- What are the fundamental physical laws of the Universe?
- How did the Universe originate and what is it made of?
In March 2007 a call for mission ideas was formally released, which yielded in 19 astrophysics, 12 fundamental physics and 19 solar system mission proposals.
All the candidate missions are now competing in an assessment cycle which ends in 2011. Before the end of the cycle, there will be an important selection foreseen in 2009.
At the end of this process, two missions will be proposed for implementation to ESA's Science Programme Committee, likely one L-Class and one M-Class, with launches planned for 2017 and 2018 respectively (ESA projects each L-Class mission to cost 650 million Euros, and each M-Class mission to cost 300 million Euros).[1]
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[edit] Solar system missions
- Laplace, an L-Class mission to study the Jovian system (with NASA)
- Tandem, an L-Class mission to Saturn, Titan and Enceladus (with NASA)
- Cross-scale, an M-Class mission to study near-earth plasma (with JAXA)
- Marco Polo, an M-Class asteroid sample-return mission (with JAXA)
[edit] Astronomy missions
- Dune, an M-Class mission to study the dark universe with a wide field imager
- SPACE, an M-Class mission to study the dark universe with a new near-infrared all-sky cosmic surveyor
- Plato, an M-Class mission to find new exoplanets and measure stellar oscillations
- SPICA, an M-Class mission next generation infrared observatory (with JAXA)
- XEUS, an L-Class mission to study the evolving universe with X-ray Spectroscopy
[edit] Notes
- ^ Europe floats future space ideas BBC, 2007-10-19
[edit] External links
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