Comparative Planetary Science with the LUVOIR Mission Concept
Abstract
LUVOIR is powerful and flexible observatory designed to revolutionize our view of the universe. Operating at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 2 point, LUVOIR will gaze at the skies at far-UV to near-IR wavelengths, with a large aperture of 8-15 m and a sophisticated instrument suite: an ultra-high contrast coronagraph (ECLIPS); a high-resolution imager (HDI); a multi-resolution, multi-object UV spectrograph and imager (LUMOS); and a UV spectropolarimeter (POLLUX). LUVOIR will be capable of detecting and characterizing hundreds of planets orbiting nearby stars, simultaneously advancing the field of "comparative exoplanetology" and potentially discovering inhabited worlds. In addition to conducting searches for biosignatures in the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets, LUVOIR will probe the properties of planets with a wide range of radii and orbital separations. Direct imaging and spectroscopy with ECLIPS will enable a systematic investigation of system architectures and the diversity of exoplanet atmospheres. Many of the planets detected by LUVOIR will be new discoveries while the most massive worlds are likely to have previous mass measurements from Gaia or radial velocity surveys. For newly discovered planets, astrometric observations with HDI or ground-based radial velocity observations will constrain planet masses, thereby creating a powerful data set for testing theories of planet formation, atmospheric evolution, photochemistry, and cloud processes.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233
- Pub Date:
- January 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AAS...23314813D