Science cases for the OWL Earth-like Planet Imager and Spectrograph (EPICS)
J.-L. Beuzit¹, R. Gratton², M. Kasper³, S. Desidera², F. Kerber³, F. Rahoui³, D. Mouillet¹, D. Rouan⁴, M. Turatto², M. Feldt⁵, H.M. Schmid⁶, D. Stam⁷, F. Selsis⁸, N. Hubin³, C. Vérinaud^3
1 Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble, Grenoble, France ² Osservatorio Di Padova, Padova, Italy ³ European Southern Observatory, Garching-bei-München, Germany
⁴ Observatoire de Paris, Meudon, France ⁵ Max-Planck Institüt für Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany ⁶ Institute of Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, ⁷ University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands ⁸ Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France
The extreme contrast in mass and luminosity between the extra-solar planets and the stars around which they orbit make detailed studies of these planets very challenging. In particular, direct observations of extra-solar planets is still beyond the capabilities of the currently available instrumentation, save for perhaps a few extreme cases of very young and massive planets at large distances from the central star. While progress in instrumentation might allow significant progress either with the 8 and 10-m ground-based telescopes (Planet Finder instruments on the VLT and Gemini) or with the new generation space telescope (JWST), imaging of extra-solar planets over a wide range of parameters, and possibly down to terrestrial planets, will require extremely large ground-based telescopes like OWL or dedicated space instrumentation (TPF or Darwin for instance). In this presentation we will outline the science objectives of EPICS, the OWL Earth-like Planet Imager and Spectrograph, and derive a first list of the corresponding high level requirements.

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