Cosmic Visions: New Space Science Missions

Cosmic Visions: New ESA Space Science Missions Move Forward. Under its Cosmic Vision initiative, the European Space Agency has selected three medium-sized science missions to enter the definition phase. Spacecraft to study dark energy, Earth-like exoplanets and our own Sun now have to prove that they can be built within the allocated budgets. 2011, just two of them will be retained to go forward for launches no earlier than 2017. This movie describes the three missions Euclid, Plato and Solar Orbiter. --- Please subscribe to Science & Reason: • www.youtube.com • www.youtube.com • www.youtube.com --- Since the early '60s, ESA has excelled in pushing back the frontiers in space science: exploring the nearest planets and the most distant celestial bodies of our solar system; lifting the veil with powerful telescopes on galaxy and star formation and probing the most violent processes in the Universe; and better understanding its evolution since the Big Bang. The three selected missions are the finalists from some 50 proposals which were whittled down to just six in late 2007 and submitted for industrial assessment. In February, the Agency's Science Programme Committee pared down the choice once more. The project called Euclid will investigate key issues in physics, cosmology and general relativity. Until about 30 years ago astronomers thought the Universe was composed of ordinary matter -- protons, neutrons, electrons and atoms. But the picture has changed dramatically: it is ...