More than 5,700 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, and efforts are underway to understand their potential for habitation.
The mission will seek to select habitable exoplanets. Image: Unsplash.
the Plato's mission (Planetary transits and star oscillations) aims to find them Exoplanets Earth-like stars, revolving around sun-like stars, and determining their size, mass, and age with unprecedented accuracy.
The satellite will explore whether any extrasolar objects are within a range Living area. This means finding out if they are at a distance from their opposite star to allow this Presence of water In a liquid state on its surface, which is a basic condition for life.
Plato's mission. Image: Wikipedia.
This proposal from European Space Agency It consists of placing a space observatory in orbit located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, at the Lagrange-2 point, which is a very stable region from the point of view of gravity.
Once that point is reached, the mission will observe a very wide portion of the southern hemisphere's sky, which includes approx 200 thousand stars located a thousand light years away Which he will film every 25 seconds for two years. Thus, the goal is to detect subtle differences in the brightness of stars, which will allow us to know The length of time it takes the planet to orbit around the star, its inclination, and its size.
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Great expectations for Plato's mission
In the astronomical field, the excitement around the possible results of the observation is complete, because, due to its unusually long duration, it will enable experts to Analysis of exoplanets that orbit their star at least twice a year And they could be located within habitable distance.
The space telescope, which will contain 26 high-tech cameras, is under construction in Cannes, France. Its release date is expected to be on December 2026.
This mission, which has an initial duration of four years, will be followed in 2029 by a mission Arielanother European Space Agency satellite will be its target Study the atmosphere of exoplanets in detail.
