The European Space Agency announced in November that unexpected expenses have forced it to cancel Eddington, a combined planet-seeking and asteroseismology mission, and scale back Bepi-Colombo, a mission to Mercury with the Japanese space agency JAXA.
Without Eddington, says the Norwegian Space Centre’s Bo Andersen, a member of ESA’s scientific program committee, “we will not get an unbiased number of the abundance of Earth-like planets in our galaxy.” The asteroseismology loss is even larger, he adds, because “we will not get the expected increase—factors of 10 to 1000—in accuracy of central parameters of stellar evolution, age, element abundances, [or] internal rotation of several hundred thousand stars.” Eddington was added in 2002 to ESA’s Cosmic Vision, the agency’s space exploration plans through 2012 (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 55 8 2002 24 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1428432 August 2002, page 24 ). Bepi-Colombo will still fly, but will be delayed by about two...
