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overlap of public and research interest. While an outreach effort on extra-solar planets will be worthwhile in its own right, we expect that an outreach effort centered around an amateur (public) involvement in science will be much more effective thanks to its novelty and emotional appeal. In order to get some feedback from the amateur community directly one of us (FK) gave a presentation at the 8 November 2004 meeting of the astronomy club ‘Max Valier’ in Bolzano, Italy. The club has more than 100 members and is well-equipped with an 80 cm telescope and modern CCDs. Their new observatory at Gummer was built with funds of the local government and is now run as a public observatory (http://www.sternwarte.it) with an extensive program of tours and observing sessions for schools and the general public. Further details of this meeting, and a more detailed proposal for follow-up, are available. 71
5 Recommendations Europe has already established leadership in major areas of the exo-planet field, including radial velocity (HARPS), transit searches (COROT), and astrometry (Gaia). The first goal of future actions should be to take full advantage of this situation, with an offensive policy to optimize the scientific return of instruments already built or foreseen in the near future [the ongoing or planned ESO instrument programmes (HARPS, UVES, CRIRES, OmegaTranS, PRIMA, GENIE, Planet Finder, etc.) are not considered further here]. The second goal is to prepare new initiatives. Suggested directions are: 1. ESA 1.1. Eddington: provide a clearer message to the community about the plans and schedule for an Eddington-type exo-planetary mission [Section 2.2.1]. 1.2. Gaia: recognise that the highest accuracy will supply the most comprehensive information on low-mass planets in the Solar neighbourhood (down to about 10 M ⊕ ), thus assisting the identification of targets for Darwin/OWL/PRIMA, and the largest number of detections, scaling as the third power of the accuracy [Section 2.2.2]. 1.3. Darwin: maintain the research and development plan for this key project in the domain of exo-planet science at high priority, consistent with the current 2015 target launch date, cf. TPF-C launch planned for 2014 [Section 3.2]. 1.4. JWST: support the ‘Astrobiology and JWST’ panel recommendations, to ensure that JWST can follow up low-mass transits discoveries [Section 2.2.4]. 1.5. Encourage the community to submit mission proposals covering the important themes in Section 3.3: e.g. a future transit survey mission significantly more performant than currently planned; an all-sky transit mission; a UV spectroscopic mission for transit spectroscopy; astrometric detection of Earth-mass planets out to 20–30 pc, etc. [Section 3.3]. 2. ESO 2.1. Support experiments to improve radial velocity mass detection limits, e.g. based on experience from HARPS, down to those imposed by stellar surface phenomena [Section 1.3]. 2.2. Characterise nearby potential planet host stars, e.g. T eff , log g, [Fe/H], M, radius, etc. [Section 4.4]. 2.3. Improve the capabilities of main-stream VLT instruments for high cadence, high S/N transit spectroscopy in the visible and infrared [Section 2.1.2]. 72
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Report by the ESA-ESO Working Group
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The working group membership was es
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3.2.2 The Darwin Ground-Based Precu
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Figure 1: Detection methods for ext
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those with masses between about 0.5
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Figure 2: Detection domains for met
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(c) Astrometric measurements do not
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Table 1: A summary of completed, op
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chemical composition of the primord
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Table 2: A summary of planned or op
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it passes behind the star. They arg
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shapes caused by extra-solar planet
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