Twinkle: A Space Mission to Probe Exoplanets

Ing-Guey Jiang^1,2,3*, Li-Chin Yeh⁴, Billy Edwards^5,6, Richard Archer^5,6

¹Institute of Astronomy, National Tsing Hua University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan
²Department of Physics, National Tsing Hua University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan
³Center for Informatics and Computation in Astronomy, National Tsing Hua University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan
⁴Institute of Computational and Modeling Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan
⁵Blue Skies Space Ltd., University College London, London, UK
⁶Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, London, UK

* Presenter:Ing-Guey Jiang, email:jiang@phys.nthu.edu.tw

The Twinkle Space Mission is a space-based observatory that has been conceived to measure the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, stars and solar system objects. The satellite is based on a high-heritage platform and will carry a 0.45 m telescope with a visible and infrared spectrograph providing simultaneous wavelength coverage from 0.5 - 4.5 μm. The spacecraft will be launched into a Sun-synchronous low-Earth polar orbit and will operate in this highly stable thermal environment for a baseline lifetime of seven years.

Twinkle will have the capability to provide high-quality infrared spectroscopic characterisation of the atmospheres of hundreds of bright exoplanets, covering a wide range of planetary types. It will also be capable of providing phase curves for hot, short-period planets around bright stars targets and of providing ultra-precise photometric light curves to accurately constrain orbital parameters, including ephemerides and transit timing/duration variations present in multi-planet systems.

An overview of Twinkle's capabilities will be presented and some example exoplanet surveys to highlight the broad range of targets the mission could observe will be discussed, demonstrating the huge scientific potential of the spacecraft.

Keywords: exoplanet, space telescope, spectroscopic observation