Report - School of Physics
Report - School of Physics
Report - School of Physics
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3.5 Summary <strong>of</strong> Prospects: 2015–2025<br />
The major space and ground-based experiments so far considered for the 2015–25<br />
time-frame do not include survey missions beyond Kepler/Eddington and Gaia, but<br />
focus on the detection and characterisation <strong>of</strong> a few low-mass planets in the Solar<br />
neighbourhood.<br />
The detection prospects are summarised in Table 8, compiled by Angel (2003), and<br />
include Darwin/TPF and OWL. An assessment <strong>of</strong> the S/N <strong>of</strong> planet detections<br />
with OWL has been made independently by Hainaut & Gilmozzi (ESO), and is in<br />
broad agreement with those in the table. The Darwin S/N assessments for both<br />
imaging and spectroscopy, detailed in Table 9, are also broadly in agreement with<br />
this summary table.<br />
Accepting the (unproven) hypothesis that there are Earth-mass planets around<br />
solar-type stars within 10–20 pc, their detection and characterisation even with Darwin/TPF<br />
and/or OWL will be challenging. At this time it would seem appropriate<br />
to continue the search with both ground and space techniques, at least until their<br />
respective technical limitations and costs are better understood.<br />
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