SPICES: Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging and Characterization of Exoplanetary Systems

Abstract

SPICES (Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging and Characterization of Exoplanetary Systems) is a five-year M-class mission proposed to ESA Cosmic Vision. Its purpose is to image and characterize long-period extrasolar planets and circumstellar disks in the visible (450 - 900 nm) at a spectral resolution of about 40 using both spectroscopy and polarimetry. By 2020/22, present and near-term instruments will have found several tens of planets that SPICES will be able to observe and study in detail. Equipped with a 1.5 m telescope, SPICES can preferentially access exoplanets located at several AUs (0.5-10 AU) from nearby stars ($<$25 pc) with masses ranging from a few Jupiter masses to Super Earths ($\sim$2 Earth radii, $\sim$10 M${}_{\oplus }$) as well as circumstellar disks as faint as a few times the zodiacal light in the Solar System.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Calibration of quasi-static aberrations in exoplanet direct-imaging instruments with a Zernike phase-mask sensor
• Apodized pupil Lyot coronagraphs for arbitrary apertures. V. Hybrid Shaped Pupil designs for imaging Earth-like planets with future space observatories
• Pre-conditioned Backward Monte Carlo solutions to radiative transport in planetary atmospheres. Fundamentals: Sampling of propagation directions in polarising media
• Phase Quantization Study of Spatial Light Modulator for Extreme High contrast Imaging
• PULSE: The Palomar Ultraviolet Laser for the Study of Exoplanets