The Cheops mission records another milestone: the European space telescope, which has been orbiting the Earth since December, has taken the first constellations.
A first analysis shows that Cheops’ pictures are even better than expected. In this case, “better” does not mean sharper because the telescope was deliberately set out of focus. The incoming light is distributed over many pixels and ensures that the trembling of the spacecraft is “smoothed”.
This increases the photometric precision. A high degree of precision will allow the mission to observe small changes in the brightness of stars outside of our solar system. This allows the size of the planets to be measured. In the next two months, the function of the space telescope, whose control software was developed in Vienna, further tested.
No “nice” photos
For inexperienced lay eyes, the Cheops pictures are not very spectacular. The telescope was not designed to take “beautiful” photos, but to measure the light intensity of stars with the greatest precision.
At the end of January, the Cheops mission had to survive a delicate moment when the lid of the space telescope was successfully opened by a sophisticated mechanism. Cheops had previously sent hundreds of pictures to Earth, all of which were completely black due to the closed cover.
The first pictures now showed that the optics survived the rocket launch safely, Benz continued. Cheops is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland under the direction of the University of Bern in collaboration with the University of Geneva.
