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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday June 25 2017, @09:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the looking-for-Tatooine dept.

The European Space Agency has approved PLATO, an exoplanet observing mission:

A mission to discover and characterise Earth-sized planets and super-Earths orbiting Sun-like stars in the habitable zone of the solar system – scientifically led by the University of Warwick - has been given the go-ahead today by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) will be launched into the 'L2' virtual point in space - 1.5 million km beyond Earth, as seen from the Sun – and will monitor thousands of bright stars over a large area of the sky.

PLATO will use 26 telescopes mounted on a single spacecraft to observe from 300,000 to one million stars. The launch date has been moved from 2024 to 2026.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will launch in March 2018. ESA's CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite (CHEOPS) is expected to launch in late 2018. These missions will help to find exoplanets suitable for study by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2019+.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:49PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:49PM (#530871) Journal

    A lot, but not all, of the people involved in this work just want to see the discoveries get made.

    PLATO would get the credit for discovering the exoplanet (which was a big deal 20 years ago, now not so much since we discover them in batches of hundreds and infer that there are billions in the galaxy), and JWST would get the credit for finding what makes the exoplanet interesting.

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