A new era is expected to arrive around 2030 with a pool of exoplanets amounting to about ten thousand, including mainly small to medium-sized planets, and over a hundred habitable terrestrial rocky planets, thanks to the space-borne transit surveys by the Kepler, TESS and PLATO missions, and ground-based transit and radial-velocity (RV) surveys. The exoplanet community has proposed various missions for detailed characterization of the terrestrial planets, but it is quite technique-demanding and time-consuming especially for those with wide orbits. The currently proposed ESA mission ARIEL is a first step for this purpose, and it is powerful for the characterizations of planets down to warm super-Earths. The NASA HabEx and LUVOIR missions are mega projects to further tackle down to habitable rocky planets, and will be in operation after 2035 if approved. In the meanwhile, China is funding a concept study of a 4-6m space telescope named HABITATS ( HABItable Terrestrial planetary ATmospheric Surveyor). HABITATS will be dedicated for the characterization of habitable rocky planets around nearby stars, which aims to start its operation within the next 10-15 years and last for 5+ years. We describe briefly the preliminary concept study of this mission and propose a baseline telescope and instrument parameter values based on our simulation results. International collaborations from various institutes and research groups are welcome to join this ambitious effort in the aspects of science, instrumentation, platform, funding resources.
"A joint project has been proposed by the Chinese and Spanish astronomy communities, to develop a high-resolution, ultra- stable spectrograph for the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at La Palma. Being expected to conduct precise radial velocity (PRV) measurement with extreme precision of up to 10 cm s−1, the instrument would promote the very high, present interest in the astronomical community to detect and characterize exoplanets. The project successfully passed the conceptual design review (CoDR) in 2019. The instrument is composed of a near-UV band spectrograph (UVS) and a visible band spectrograph (VIS). They provide a spectral resolving power of R ≥100,000 in the visible band (420 nm – 780 nm), and R≥25,000 in the UV band (310 nm – 420 nm). The VIS subsystem will be enclosed in an ultra-stable environment in the Coudé room for the stellar precise radial velocity (PRV) measurements. T he UVS subsystem will be located near the Nasmyth focus to improve the total throughput at the wavelength shorter than 400 nm, to ensure various additional science cases ranging from stellar evolution to the measurement of fundamental constants. This paper gives an overview of the project background, science cases, and technical considerations during the conceptual design phase."
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