Status and recent progress of the Darwin mission in the Cosmic Vision program

摘要

A brief overview of the Darwin project in the context of the European Space Agency's Cosmic Vision program is given. The scientific goals in the context of the new approach with themes, is given. The goals are broken down into a stepwise approach first relating current ground based and immediate space based experiments (e.g. radial velocity measurements from the ground and the CNES/ESA COROT occultation mission). Then, the different approaches to how to achieving the full goal of a survey of the nearest stars is described. Then, a brief outline of steps following after the current objectives of Darwin have been reached will follow. Some focus is also given to the response of the European community on how to address these goals in a timely and technically correct fashion. This will lead up to scenarios likely to occur over the next 3 years. Darwin is developed through an active technology program, parts of which are described in other papers at this conference. A description of where the different elements fit will be given. Finally the international aspects as currently foreseen are presented.