Website:
Coordination:
PI: J.-F. Donati (Toulouse)
Coordinator of Portuguese Team: J. F. Gameiro.
Funding:
a Generation of Earth-ANalogs Exploration Spectrographs (G.EANES)
COMPETE2020: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-032113 & FCT: PTDC/FIS-AST/32113/2017
Partners:
The SPIRou science team includes ~140 astronomers from France, Canada and several other countries worldwide including Taiwan, Switzerland, Brazil & Portugal.
SPIRou is a near-infrared (nIR) spectropolarimeter / velocimeter for the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). SPIRou aims in particular at becoming world-leader on two forefront science topics, (i) the quest for Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of very-low-mass stars, and (ii) the study of low-mass star & planet formation in the presence of magnetic fields. The science programs that SPIRou tackles are forefront, ambitious and timely – ideally phased in particular with complementary space missions like TESS and later-on JWST and PLATO.
The Portuguese team is strongly involved on the study of stellar activity and on direct detection of exoplanets.