Scientists Step Closer to Finding Planets Like Earth

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The UK Space Agency has invested £25 million in innovative science for the European Space Agency mission, called Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), ensuring UK scientists and engineers, led by the University of Warwick, will take part in all aspects of the mission.

Caroline Harper, Head of Space Science at the UK Space Agency, said: “The critical milestone review has confirmed the maturity of the design and the robustness of the build schedule for both the science instruments and the spacecraft they will fly on, so it is now full speed ahead for PLATO. The mission offers the exciting potential for a rocky planet with life signatures to be detected using innovative sensors, electronics and software developed in the UK, on a mission with UK science leadership.”

Planned to launch in 2026, the next-generation planet hunting mission will monitor thousands of relatively bright stars over a large area of the sky, searching for tiny, regular dips in brightness as their planets transit in front of them, temporarily blocking out a small fraction of the starlight. The analysis of these transits and of the variations in the starlight will allow us to characterise the properties of the exoplanets and their host stars.

Astronomers have so far found over 3,000 planets beyond our Solar System which are called exoplanets, but none, as yet, has been shown to be truly Earth-like in terms of its size and distance from a Sun similar to our own. PLATO’s innovative design is set to change all that. 

Its suite of 26 small telescopes and cameras, reminiscent of the compound eye of an insect, will allow it to ‘stare’ at a large number of the nearest and brightest stars, with the aim of discovering Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars in the ‘habitable zone’ – the distance from the star where liquid water could exist at the surface.