Welcome and The ESA Ariel Space Mission

An Introduction to the workshop. We will present the European Space Agency Ariel Space Mission scheduled to launch in 2031, which will conduct an unprecedented survey of approximately 1000 exoplanets. We discuss the mission's scientific objectives, focusing on atmospheric characterization through spectroscopic observations, and examine current mission development status. Critically, we explain how Ariel's observational requirements translate into computational challenges: detecting signals orders of magnitude fainter than instrumental and astrophysical noise sources across 0.5 - 7.8 observations (Near IR - IR).