Eye in the sky: Europe to launch a major space observatory

The six-year mission has a budget of $821 million.

PARIS:

Europe on Wednesday unveiled plans to launch a major space observatory in 2024 aimed at finding planets orbiting other stars, one of the new frontiers of astronomy.

An unmanned probe named PLATO -- for Planetary Transits and Oscillations -- will look for telltale wobbles in starlight that point to an ‘exoplanet’ moving in front of its host star, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

The six-year mission has a budget of 600 million euros ($821 million), ESA said.   Equipped with 34 small telescopes and cameras, PLATO will scrutinise thousands of star systems.   Its will seek out Earth-sized planets and “super-Earths” that orbit stars in the so-called habitable zone, the agency said in a press release.   This is the distance at which surface water can exist in liquid form and thus nurture life, as opposed to existing permanently as ice or a vapour. A total of 775 confirmed extrasolar planets have been found since the first was spotted in 1995, according to a tally kept by the website http://exoplanets.org.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 20^th, 2014.