The European Space Agency has announced a three-year space mission which they hope to collect data on planets that have similar qualities to Earth and are located to star approximately the same distance the Sun is from our planet.
The mission, which has been called the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of starts, or PLATO, won't begin until 2024, but scientists already have high expectations and a clear-cut plan for what that hope to accomplish.
"This is fantastic news for Europe. PLATO will allow the first systematic survey of nearby planets for indications from advanced life forms (as well as slime), said PLATO Science consortium leader Don Pollacco, from the University of Warwick, according to a university news release.
The telescope will be made up of 34 telescopes, which will help the ESA observe planets without any issues from the Sun or distortion from Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists hope to find planets that are smaller than Earth as well.
Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, Adam Burrows, has published a review of exoplanet research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week that says scientists have come up with "hard facts" about the atmosphere and the chance alien planets are habitable.
"Exoplanet research is in a period of productive fermentation that implies we're doing something new that will indeed mature," Burrows said. "Our observations just aren't yet of a quality that is good enough to draw the conclusions we want to draw.
By using PLATO, the ESA is hoping to calculate characteristics of exoplanets like radius, density, age, and mass, which should be "an indication of its composition."
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