Previous year the agency announced future missions to the moon.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the launch of a deep-space observatory to hunt down habitable planets in other star systems and any alien life forms that may reside there.
Professor Laurent Gizon, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, said: "Plato will for the first time fully characterise these stars and their planets with regard to mass, radius, and age". Launch is expected in 2034.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has a long and troubled history. The mission's launch was originally scheduled for 2024 but now it has been pushed back to 2026. L3 will focus around the gravitational Universe, in particular waves created by celestial objects with very strong gravity, such as pairs of merging black holes; a phenomena that was hypothesised by Albert Einstein a century ago. Significant progress has already been achieved with the ground-based LIGO detectors for these ripples in spacetime, however these interferometers search for waves at a higher frequency than what LISA will detect. It's real astronomy now; [LIGO has found] four black holes and it will find many more.
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The success of LIGO has also given new impetus for US involvement in LISA; NASA is now expected to contribute up to 20% of the roughly €1 billion cost of the mission, probably by contributing lasers and the telescopes to pick up their light.
Headquartered in Paris, the ESA is a collaborative agency with 22 member states. "We will work as fast as possible to be ready to launch". PLATO is a medium-sized ESA mission, with a budget below €500 million.
Astronomers will focus their attention on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone - the orbital region where temperatures are mild enough to allow liquid surface water - of nearby sun-like stars. To find them, the spacecraft will be equipped with 26 telescopes, each 12 centimeters in diameter, which can continuously monitor about 50% of the sky. Had they been visible to the naked eye, they would appear as dark dots tracking across their bright stars. The telescopes will spot exoplanets as they pass in front of and dim the light of their stars. Follow-up observations from the ground will add the planets' masses to the catalog. They'll survey large areas of the sky for up to two years at a time in order get a good look at distant exoplanets and the stars they orbit.
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