The European Space Agency’s exoplanet-hunting CHEOPS telescope has taken its first images of the Universe and they are better than expected.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) first exoplanet-hunting telescope CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) has made the next leap in its operations. The satellite, placed into a low-Earth orbit by the Soyuz rocket on December 18th 2019, has taken its first image of the Universe.

CHEOPS primary mission is to act as a bridge between the exoplanet-hunting missions of the past and the next generation of exoplanet investigation undertaken by the James Webb space-telescope — set to launch in 2021 — and the Earth-based Extremely Large Telescope — currently under construction in the Acatma Desert, Chile. It will not discover new exoplanets, but rather refine current targets and turn them into ‘golden targets’ prime for further detailed investigations.

The first image of the star chosen as a target for CHEOPS after cover opening. The star, at the centre of the image, is located at a distance of 150 light-years from us, in the constellation of Cancer. The image is about 1000x1000 pixels in size, with each pixel representing a tiny angle of about 0.0003 degrees (1 arcsecond) on the sky. The other, fainter stars in the image are in the background of the target. The inset in the lower right corner shows a region of about 100-pixels in width, centred on the target star. The peculiar shape of the star in the image is due to the deliberate defocusing of CHEOPS optics. CHEOPS measures the star’s brightness by adding up the light received in all pixels within a region centred on the star as illustrated by the circle in the picture. The defocusing spreads the light onto many pixels, which allows CHEOPS to reach best possible photometric precision. (© ESA/Airbus/CHEOPS Mission Consortium)

As well as providing a happy moment for space and astronomy enthusiasts across the globe, receiving the image acted as a significant relief to the Consortium of ESA researchers and scientists from the Universities of Bern and Geneva which operates the telescope.

“The first images that were about to appear on the screen were crucial for us to be able to determine if the telescope’s optics had survived the rocket launch in good shape,” explains Willy Benz, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Bern and Principal Investigator of the CHEOPS mission. “When the first images of a field of stars appeared on the screen, it was immediately clear to everyone that we did indeed have a working telescope.”

Cheops in the cleanroom at Airbus, Madrid (© ESA — S. Corvaja)

The team now need to determine just how well the telescope is working. The next two months will consist of the team running a battery of tests to determine CHEOPS’ effectiveness. Fortunately, the initial signs are good. “We will analyze many more images in detail to determine the exact level of accuracy that can be achieved by CHEOPS in the different aspects of the science program,” says David Ehrenreich, CHEOPS project scientist at the University of Geneva.

“The results so far bode well.”