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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The European Space Agency has approved PLATO [wikipedia.org], an exoplanet observing mission [warwick.ac.uk]:

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 [phys.org] to observe from 300,000 to one million stars. The launch date has been moved from 2024 to 2026 [theregister.co.uk].

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite [wikipedia.org] (TESS) will launch in March 2018. ESA's CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite [wikipedia.org] (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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