All that you need to know about Eddington:
- The Eddington mission was a project by the European Space Agency (ESA) to search for Earth-like planets in distant star systems.
- Named after the astronomer Arthur Eddington, it paid tribute to his work on stellar structure, atmospheres, and his contributions to Einstein’s theory of relativity.
- The Eddington spacecraft was designed to carry four telescopes that would monitor different regions of the sky, each for intervals of about two months.
- Using a single spacecraft in Earth’s orbit, Eddington would have continuously observed more than 100,000 stars for up to three years in search of exoplanetary transits.
- Eddington would also conduct asteroseismic studies, collecting high-resolution data on the oscillations of around 50,000 stars to understand their internal structure.
- The mission’s goal was to identify thousands of planets of varying sizes and detect tens of potentially habitable, Earth-like planets.
- It would have detected planetary transits by observing the slight dimming in starlight when a planet crosses in front of its host star.
- The spacecraft was planned to launch on a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, traveling to the L2 Lagrangian point beyond the Moon for a five-year mission.
- But the mission which was originally scheduled for launch in 2008, was later delayed and then cancelled in 2003.
- The mission was ultimately cancelled in November 2003 due to budget constraints within the ESA, despite considerable advocacy and pushback from the scientific community.
Currently, Eddington is being considered a continuation of efforts in asteroseismology from space, following earlier missions like the French COROT mission (2006-2014) and Canada’s MOST mission (2003-2019).
