Design of a CCD Camera Prototype for the Earth 2.0 Mission

Earth 2.0 is a Chinese space satellite mission that uses the transit and microlensing methods to search for exoplanets, especially Earth-sized terrestrial planets, including habitable terrestrial planets around sun-like stars. The satellite will work in the halo orbit of the Sun-Earth L2 point for at least 4 years, and is expected to find about 20 Earth like planets in the 4-year observation period. In this paper a CCD camera prototype based on a 4kx4k CCD250 detector for early technology demonstration and high-accuracy photometric performance verification is introduced. The key performance indicators such as readout noise, gain, and linearity of the camera are tested, and the test results will be described.