ESA ESTEC Test Centre Sounds: CHEOPS space telescope acoustic testing (Mic 8)

Spacecraft and Satellites are expensive, and once in space they cannot be easily fixed. This is why they must be tested thoroughly before they are sent into space. During the various phases of its development a spacecraft or satellite and its component parts undergo extensive testing. The majority of ESA spacecraft and satellites are tested at the ESA ESTEC Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. This is the sound of ESA's CHEOPS - CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite - being tested in the Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF). Anyone who has witnessed a rocket launch is struck by the amount of noise produced by it – even when standing several kilometres from the launch pad. Of course a satellite on top of its launcher is exposed to much higher levels of acoustic noise. Long before it gets to that stage its designers have to test that the satellite can withstand such a sustained sound – and this is done at the LEAF. Listen to how it sounds - and to some according explanations artist and technologist Peter Kirn gives: http://tedx.esa.int/talks/space-science-sound-system/ CHEOPS is the first mission dedicated to searching for exoplanetary transits by performing ultra-high precision photometry on bright stars already known to host planets. The mission's main science goals are to measure the bulk density of super-Earths and Neptunes orbiting bright stars and provide suitable targets for future in-depth characterisation studies of exoplanets in these mass and size ranges. Read more at http://sci.esa.int/cheops/ The sample is completely unedited and in its original length. Sound Credit: ESA - European Space Agency, ESTEC, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 http://www.esa.int/Services/Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_IGO_CC_BY-SA_3.0_IGO_Licence Image Credit: ESA - Christophe Carreau