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ESA to launch its space-based observatory PLATO to hunt planets by 2024

 

Washington: A space-based observatory to search for planets orbiting alien stars has been selected as ESA's third medium-class science mission, and is planned for launch by 2024.

The PLATO - Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars - mission was selected by ESA's Science Programme Committee for implementation as part of its Cosmic Vision 2015-25 Programme.

The mission will address two key themes of Cosmic Vision: what are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life, and how does the Solar System work.

PLATO will monitor relatively nearby stars, searching for tiny, regular dips in brightness as their planets transit in front of them, temporarily blocking out a small fraction of the starlight.

By using 34 separate small telescopes and cameras, PLATO will search for planets around up to a million stars spread over half of the sky.

It will also investigate seismic activity in the stars, enabling a precise characterisation of the host sun of each planet discovered, including its mass, radius and age.

When coupled with ground-based radial velocity observations, PLATO's measurements will allow a planet's mass and radius to be calculated, and therefore its density, providing an indication of its composition.

The mission will identify and study thousands of exoplanetary systems, with an emphasis on discovering and characterising Earth-sized planets and super-Earths in the habitable zone of their parent star - the distance from the star where liquid surface water could exist.

PLATO will be launched on a Soyuz rocket from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou by 2024 for an initial six-year mission. It will operate from L2, a virtual point in space 1.5 million km beyond Earth as seen from the Sun.

ANI

 

Sourse : Zee News


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