The quest for other habitable worlds and the search for life among them are major goals of
modern astronomy. One way to make progress towards these goals is to obtain high-quality …

Darwin/TPF is a project of an infrared space-based interferometer designed to directly detect
and characterize terrestrial exoplanets around nearby stars. Unlike spectrophotometric …

Context. One of the long-term goals of exoplanet science is the atmospheric characterization
of dozens of small exoplanets in order to understand their diversity and search for habitable …

Context. An important future goal in exoplanetology is to detect and characterize potentially
habitable planets. Concepts for future space missions have already been proposed: from a …

Context. Temperate terrestrial exoplanets are likely to be common objects, but their
discovery and characterization is very challenging because of the small intrinsic signal …

DARWIN is a cornerstone mission of the Horizons 2000+ program of the European Space
Agency. It has the express purpose of carrying out the first direct search for terrestrial …

During the last few years, considerable effort has been directed towards large-scale (> $1
Billion) missions to detect and characterize earth-like planets around nearby stars, such as …

One of the long-term goals of exoplanet science is the (atmospheric) characterization of a
large sample (> 100) of terrestrial planets to assess their potential habitability and overall …

The study of extrasolar planetary systems has thrived during the last two decades,
stimulated by the discovery of circumstellar dust and extrasolar planets around main …

ESA already identified interferometry in space as an important topic in its original Horizon
2000 plan. Consequently, a number of conferences/workshops were held during the 1980s …