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The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment: Chasing Big Planets with a Small Satellite
April 12, 2023 PDT
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NASA Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute’s
Community of Practice Webinar Series
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Join us on Wednesday, April 12, 2023, 10:00AM-11:00AM PT for a webinar by Kevin France.
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder
Atmospheric escape is a process that affects the structure, composition, and evolution of many planets. The signatures of this escape are detectable on close-in, gaseous exoplanets orbiting bright stars, owing to the high levels of extreme-ultraviolet irradiance from their nearby parent stars. The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a 6U CubeSat mission designed to take advantage of the near-ultraviolet stellar brightness distribution to conduct a survey of the extended atmospheres of nearby close-in planets. The CUTE payload is a near-ultraviolet (2487 – 3376 Ang) spectrograph fed by a rectangular, Cassegrain telescope (206 mm x 84mm); the spectrogram is recorded on a back-illuminated, UV-enhanced CCD. CUTE was launched into a polar, low-Earth orbit on 27 September 2021 and has been conducting this survey following an on-orbit commissioning period. An overview of the CUTE mission will be presented, including its motivation and development path. The presentation will conclude with on-orbit science data and observations of excess NUV absorption on short-period planets acquired as part of CUTE’s science program.
S3VI encourages the community to submit questions before the webinar to enable more directed responses. Please send questions to: [email protected]
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