The Earth 2.0 (ET) space mission has entered its phase B study in China. It seeks to understand how frequently habitable Earth-like planets orbit solar-type stars (Earth 2.0s), the formation and evolution of terrestrial-like planets, and the origin of free-floating planets. The final design of ET includes six 28 cm diameter transit telescope systems, each with a field of view of 550 square degrees, and one 35 cm diameter microlensing telescope with a field of view of 4 square degrees. In transit mode, ET will continuously monitor over 2 million FGKM dwarfs in the original Kepler field and its neighboring fields for four years. Simultaneously, in microlensing mode, it will observe over 30 million I < 20.5 stars in the Galactic bulge direction. Simulations indicate that ET mission could identify approximately 40,000 new planets, including about 4,000 terrestrial-like planets across a wide range of orbital periods and in the interstellar space, ~1000 microlensing planets, ~10 Earth 2.0s and around 25 free-floating Earth mass planets. Coordinated observations with ground-based KMTNet telescopes will enable the measurement of masses for ~300 microlensing planets, helping determine the mass distribution functions of free-floating planets and cold planets. ET will operate from the Earth-Sun L2 halo orbit with a designed lifetime exceeding 4 years. The phase B study involves detailed design and engineering development of the transit and microlensing telescopes. Updates on this mission study are reported.
The successful achievement of the scientific objectives of the Visible Telescope (VT) in the Space Multi-band Variable Object Monitor (SVOM) mission relies heavily on high-precision quantum efficiency calibration. The calibration process for the VT CCD presents a challenge due to the requirement for extremely low radiation levels given the long integration time of the CCD. To address the difficulty in accurately measuring such low radiance, a two-step calibration method is employed. This method involves the use of two photodiodes, one positioned at the CCD location and the other in an integrating sphere. In the first step, the proportional relationship between the measured illuminance values of the two photodiodes is calibrated under high illumination conditions. This step establishes a reliable reference for subsequent calibrations. In the second step, the CCD is calibrated using the integrating sphere photodiode under low illumination conditions. The measured illuminance is then converted to the CCD position. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of this two-step calibration method, achieving a quantum efficiency calibration uncertainty of 1.7%. This approach provides a reliable and accurate means of calibrating the quantum efficiency of the CCD in the VT instrument.
A space mission called “Earth 2.0 (ET)” is being developed in China to address a few of fundamental questions in the exoplanet field: How frequently habitable Earth-like planets orbit solar type stars (Earth 2.0s)? How do terrestrial planets form and evolve? Where did floating planets come from? ET consists of six 30 cm diameter transit telescope systems with each field of view of 500 square degrees and one 35 cm diameter microlensing telescope with a field of view of 4 square degrees. The ET transit mode will monitor ~1.2M FGKM dwarfs in the original Kepler field and its neighboring fields continuously for four years while the microlensing mode monitors over 30M I< 20.6 stars in the Galactic bulge direction. ET will merge its photometry data with that from Kepler to increase the time baseline to 8 years. This enhances the transit signal-to-noise ratio, reduce false positives, and greatly increases the chance to discover Earth 2.0s. Simulations show that ET transit telescopes will be able to identify ~17 Earth 2.0s, about 4,900 Earth-sized terrestrial planets and about 29,000 new planets. In addition, ET will detect about 2,000 transit-timingvariation (TTV) planets and 700 of them will have mass and eccentricity measurements. The ET microlensing telescope will be able to identify over 1,000 microlensing planets. With simultaneous observations with the ground-based KMTNet telescopes, ET will be able to measure masses of over 300 microlensing planets and determine the mass distribution functions of free-floating planets and cold planets. ET will be operated at the Earth-Sun L2 orbit with a designed lifetime longer than 4 years.
The Earth 2.0 (ET) mission is a space mission in China which will be operated at the Earth-Sun L2 orbit with a designed lifetime longer than 4 years. ET’s scientific payload consist of six 30cm diameter transit telescopes with each field of view of 500 square degrees and one 35 cm diameter microlensing telescope with a field of view of 4 square degrees. Each telescope is equipped with a camera with 2×2 9K×9K CMOS detectors, and Front-end Electronics (FEE). Each transit telescope is an f/1.57 eightlens refractive optical system while the microlensing telescope is an f/17.2 catadioptric optical system with diffraction-limited design. The diameter of 90% Encircled Energy (EE90) for transit telescopes is within 5×5 pixels while the FWHM of PSF for the microlensing telescope is less than 0.78 arcsec. Fine Guidance Sensors are mounted at the four edges of the CMOS camera. All seven telescopes are fixed on a common mounting reference plate, and a large sun shield is used to block the heat flow from the Sun and provide a stable thermal environment for the telescopes. It also blocks straylight form the Sun, Earth, and the Moon. Each telescope has an additional top hood to block straylight incident at a large angle while the top hood is also used as a radiator to cool the detectors to below - 40°C. With PID heating loops, each telescope will work at -30±0.3°C while the detectors work at - 40±0.1°C. Details of the conceptual design for the scientific payload will be presented.
The Earth 2.0 (ET) mission is a Chinese space mission to detect thousands of Earth-sized terrestrial planets, including habitable Earth-like planets orbiting solar type stars (Earth 2.0s), cold low-mass planets, and free-floating planets. The six 30 cm diameter transit telescopes will be equipped with a CMOS camera which consists of 4(2×2)9K×9K CMOS sensors. A prototype camera with a 8900×9120 pixel GSENSE 1081 BSI type CMOS sensor and temperature control is designed and developed for high precision photometry measurements. In this paper, details of this camera design and performance test results are reported.
Compared with CCD detector, CMOS detector has the advantages of high integration, low power consumption, fast readout speed and low production cost. CCD detectors are used in traditional astronomical observations. At present, low-noise CMOS detectors are not used to realize spaceborne astronomical projects in the world. From the index analysis of a project, one 6K * 6K CMOS detector which developed by a company can meet application of one project. Based on this detector, designing low noise driver and bias hardware circuit. This design mainly uses LDO with low noise and high PSRR to produce stable low noise driving power supply, in addition, the driving signal waveform required by the detector is controlled by FPGA to ensure the signal integrity to avoid interference feed. The bias voltage required by the detector is generated by low-noise voltage reference device, high-resolution DAC and low-noise operational amplifier.
The Space-based multi-band astronomical Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) project is a dedicated satellite developed at the cooperation of China and France, aim to make prompt multi-band observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), the afterglows and other high-energy transient astronomical events. The Visible Telescope (VT) is one of the four payloads onboard the SVOM. VT is designed to observe the afterglows of GRBs both in the visible and near infrared bands simultaneously. The telescope can reach a limiting magnitude of +22.5Mv and provide the redshift indicators for high-Z (z<4) GRBs. VT is also designed to measure the Relative Performance Errors (RPEs) for the satellite attitude and orbit control system (AOCS), aiming to improve the pointing stability of the platform during observation. VT adopts a Ritchey-Chrétien (RC) catadioptric optical configuration with a 440mm aperture and uses the dichroic prism before the focal plane to split the incident light into blue (visible) and red (near infrared) band. Two Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) CCDs are mounted beside the main CCD on the blue band focal plane of VT and provide sub-arcsecond pixel resolution. Fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) composites is selected as the material of VT’s main structure to ensure enough stiffness and strength during launch. The electrical video processing circuit is carefully designed to make the readout noise below 6e-/pix (rms) in 100s exposure time. Active and passive thermal control are used together to ensure the optical performance and thermoelectric cooler (TEC) is adopted to control the main CCDs working temperature below -65°C to reduce the noise. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the scientific requirements and the key instrument design aspects of optics, main structure, electrics, thermal control, performance test and validation results of VT.
Image fusion is to get a fused image that contains all important information from source images of the same scene. Meanwhile, multi-scale transforms and sparse representation (SR) are the two most effective techniques for image fusion. However, the SR-based image fusion methods are time-consuming and do not take the structural information of the source images into consideration. In addition, different multi-scale transform-based methods have their inevitable defects waiting to be solved till now. Therefore, in this paper, a new image fusion method combining nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) with SR is proposed. A decision map for the low-frequency coefficients according to the high-frequency coefficients is made to overcome these problems. Furthermore, it can reduce the calculation cost of the fusion algorithm and retain the useful information of source images as far as possible. Comparing with conventional multi-scale transform based methods and sparse representation based methods with a fixed or learned dictionary, the proposed method has better fusion performance in the field of medical image fusion.
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