Paris (AFP)

The launch of the Cheops space telescope dedicated to the study of exoplanets, which was to leave French Guiana on Tuesday on board a Soyuz rocket, has been postponed by the company Arianespace, which specifies that investigations are underway.

"The launch of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, CHEOPS, OPS-SAT, EyeSat, ANGELS satellites, originally scheduled for December 17, has been postponed," Arianespace said in a statement. "The new target launch date will be announced as soon as possible," she added.

"Due to a red at the start of the automated SYZ launch system sequence, operations are stopped for today. Satellites and launchers are safe. Investigations underway according to standard procedures. More details expected later in Go VS23, Go! ", tweeted Stéphane Israël, president of Arianespace.

"Launch postponed. More information soon ....", tweeted the European Space Agency (ESA) which heads the Cheops mission with Switzerland.

Nearly 4,000 exoplanets - orbiting a star other than the Sun - have been detected since the discovery of the first, 51 Pegasi b, 24 years ago.

"We have since known that there are planets everywhere, that about one star out of two has its procession of planets. Now we want to go beyond statistics and study them in detail," said David Ehrenreich, manager mission scientist.

Because the objective of Cheops (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite) is not to flush out new exoplanets but to analyze those already identified, to try to understand what they are made of, a step in the long quest for form conditions of extraterrestrial life, but also of the origins of the Earth.

- the "near suburb" of the Sun -

Embedded in a satellite, the telescope will orbit 700 km above the Earth so as not to be disturbed by the atmosphere, and will access the whole sky, Sun in the back.

Its target: Proxima Centauri, 55 Cancri, Koro 1 ... at least 400 planetary systems, a few hundred light years away - the "near suburb" of the Sun on the scale of the Milky Way.

The data collected by Cheops, combined with information collected by ground-based telescopes, will make it possible to measure density, an essential parameter for determining the composition of the planet. A fundamental criterion to define the probability that a planet can harbor life.

But the mission will also study the so-called "non-habitable" planets, to understand their diversity. "By observing exoplanets, we realize that the solar system is completely atypical", noted Francis Rocard, planetologist at CNES: elsewhere, there are "everywhere" objects that do not exist with us, mini-Neptune , super-Earth with large envelopes of gas, "hot Jupiter" ....

The Soyuz medium launcher, of which it is the third launch of the year, was to take off at 05:54 am Kourou time (08:54 min GMT) from the Guiana Space Center. But "during the final chronological operations of Flight VS23, the automatic sequence of the Soyuz launcher was interrupted at H0-1h25", specified the launch service company in a press release.

Soyuz was also to take the Earth observation satellite COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian Ministry of Defense. And three auxiliary charges: Angels, the first nanosatellite produced financed by CNES and entirely by French industry; Eyesat, also funded by CNES; and Ops-Sat, on behalf of ESA.

A launch in which a start-up in Toulouse (southwest) bases all its hopes: Anywaces, a company of 16 employees founded in 2017 by a former CNES employee, has equipped its antennas with the Angels and Eyesat satellites.

"This is our first launch," said Anywaves president Nicolas Capet. This new player in the French "New space" - a booming entrepreneurial movement in the space sector - presents itself as "the only equipment supplier on the nanosatellite antenna market in Europe" and sees its activity double every year since its creation.

© 2019 AFP