ESA announced the approval of the Plato (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission, a new generation planet hunter. It aims to find potentially habitable exoplanets similar to Earth or the so-called super-Earths, determining their characteristics with a precision never seen before.

In recent decades we got used to seeing even very large space telescopes, instead the space probe Plato will be fitted with a battery of 34 small telescopes, designed by a team led by Roberto Regazzoni, an astronomer at INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, National Institute for Astrophysics) – Observatory of Padua and professor of optics at the University of Padua, in Italy. Each of these telescopes can see an area of ​​sky 5,000 larger than the full Moon.

The set of these 34 telescopes will observe an area of ​​amplitude similar to that of the human eye. At the same time, they have the capability to analyze in detail every little change in the light of realatively nearby stars, up to a million of them, to discover new planets. The accuracy of the observations will also allow to determine the characteristics of these exoplanets, including their mass, radius and age.

This new level in the research and study of exoplanets will be possible thanks to the combined work of the Plato spacecraft with other satellites and ground-based observatories. A help will come from the Gaia spacecraft, launched in December 2013, whose observations will allow to choose the most interesting candidates among the surveyed stars to focus the research on.

The observations of other planetary systems will also help to better understand our solar system. The purpose is to understand how normal is the existence of planets on which there are the conditions for life forms of the type known to us to emerge.

The approval of the Plato mission is only the first step. The construction of such a sophisticated space probe is a long job, in fact its launch is planned by 2024. The Plato spacecraft will be placed in a Lissajous orbit, around the point known as L2. It’s a Lagrangian point about 1.5 million km (about 930,000 miles) from Earth. The expected duration of the observations is six years.

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