TOLIMAN: a small space telescope to search for planets around Alpha Centauri

Star system: Alpha Centauri | Distance from the Sun: 4.4 light years

The TOLIMAN mission is building and preparing to launch a low-cost space telescope with a unique optical design. Its main goal is to search for rocky, Earth-like planets in temperate orbits around the stars Alpha Centauri A and B, the closest Sun-like stars to Earth. Finding such planets is difficult with current instruments, even though these stars are nearby and bright.

TOLIMAN will use a technique called narrow-angle astrometry, which measures tiny changes in the positions of stars caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets. Detecting these signals is extremely challenging, as they amount to only a few millionths of an arcsecond. Most missions would require a large telescope, but TOLIMAN’s innovative optical and signal processing design allows it to achieve this with a small 12.5-centimeter aperture. The telescope and its science instruments are being built into a compact CubeSat spacecraft. The mission paper describes the special optics that enable such precise measurements, as well as the spacecraft systems that support the science goals.

Key findings
- TOLIMAN is a low-cost space telescope designed to search for planets around Alpha Centauri A and B
- It uses narrow-angle astrometry to detect tiny stellar movements caused by orbiting planets
- The mission achieves high precision with a small 12.5 cm telescope using innovative optics
- The telescope and instruments are housed in a CubeSat spacecraft
- The mission is under construction and aims to make planet searches more accessible and affordable

Scientific study

The TOLIMAN mission: A low-cost space telescope for high precision narrow-angle astrometry (external link)