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The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch a space-based observatory by 2024 to search for planets outside our solar system that could be hospitable to life.
The mission is called PLATO, which stands for “PLAanetary Transits and Oscillations of stars.” “PLATO will discover Earth-like planets with the prerequisites necessary for life,” predicted Laurent Gizon, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Goettingen, Germany, which is participating in the mission.
An MPS data centre will evaluate PLATO data.
Equipped with 34 small telescopes and cameras, PLATO will operate about 1.5 million km from Earth, monitoring as many as a million nearby stars.
It will be launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket from ESA’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana for an initial six-year mission.
To discover the exoplanets, PLATO will look for tiny, regular dips in stars’ brightness as orbiting planets transit in front of them. It will also investigate seismic activity in any stars found to have planets, enabling a determination of the stars’ mass, radius and age.
Coupled with ground-based radial velocity observations – the back-and-forth movements of stars relative to Earth as they “wobble” under the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet – calculations will be made of the planets’ mass and radius, and therefore density, providing an indication of their composition.
“PLATO’s discoveries will help us to compare the makeup of our solar system with that of other planetary systems,” said Alvaro Gimenez, ESA’s director of Science and Robotic Exploration.
The mission will be run by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne.
Heike Rauer, head of the department Extrasolar Planets and Atmospheres at the DLR’s Institute of Planetary Research, said, “We’ll find planets that orbit their Sun-like star in the habitable zone, where conditions are suitable for life – planets that may have liquid water on their surface and on which development of life as we know it could therefore be possible.”
Part of ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-25 programme, PLATO follows the ESA mission CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) and NASA mission Kepler, which have discovered hundreds of exoplanets and came to an end in the summer of 2013.
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