The members of the BAG are involved in the following future space missions
for asteroseismology:
Europe
In the forthcoming decade at least two European space missions will be devoted
to asteroseismology. It concerns
Rømer/MONS (Measuring
Oscillations in Nearby Stars), which is a Danish-led mission, and
COROT
(Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits), a French-led European mission.
Both missions are in full preparation at present, with launches foreseen in 2005 and
lifetimes of about two years.
Several members of the BAG are involved in the development of these missions.
This will allow us to combine the expertises at the four institutes, so that we
can fully concentrate on the unique opportunity of exploring space data in a
research area in which Belgian scientists already have an excellent reputation.
Besides MONS and COROT, the ESA mission
Eddington
was selected as a Flexi mission by ESA's SPC in May 2002 to be launched in the time
frame 2007 - 2008. The BAG is one of the groups involved in the
different consortia that were constructed by ESA in order to refine the mission
specifications for Eddington.
US and Canada
After the failure of the main NASA Wide-Field Infrared Explorer
(WIRE)
mission, its star tracker was used for asteroseismology. The WIRE star tracker was
operational with this particular goal from 30/4/1999
up to 30/9/2000.The preliminary results of the asteroseismological programme with
the star tracker of the WIRE satellite are extremely promising. For this reason, the
WIRE star tracker was switched on again in 2002 in order to assemble high-quality
photometry for a large range of pulsators that cover the complete HR diagram.
The Canadian MOST
(Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) will be the first
planned space mission fully devoted to asteroseismology.The launch of MOST is
foreseen for early 2003. MOST will open the field of space asteroseismology,
although it will observe only a very limited number of very bright targets.
President:Arlette Noels
Web pages:Sandrine Sohy
Last update: April 07, 2003
