Computer And Technology News: Spacecraft "Plato" Researchers are looking for twins of Earth

Friday, February 21, 2014

Spacecraft "Plato" Researchers are looking for twins of Earth - T-Online

spacecraft “Plato”

Researchers are looking for twins of Earth
21/02/2014, 17:13 Clock | dpa

The spacecraft “Plato is to search the space for Earth-like planets (Source: Reuters).

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how planets form? Is life possible on them? With a year-long project astronomers want to search in space for planets that are similar to Earth.

With a new spacecraft, the European Space Agency ESA will search for twins of Earth. “‘Plato’ will discover planets like the Earth, which provide the necessary conditions for life,” says Laurent Gizon, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS).

the probe tip to the latest 2024 set off from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou aboard a Soyuz. The MPS is working on the originally planned six-year mission.

out at about one million stars

“Plato” is to keep using 34 telescopes and cameras at about one million stars looking for planets. The data should allow to calculate the mass and radius of the planet. The researchers want to draw conclusions as to their composition.

“” Plato’s “discoveries will help to compare the structure of our solar system with other planetary systems,” said Alvaro Giménez, ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic Exploration.

data are analyzed on the ground

headed the mission by the German Aerospace Center (DLR / Cologne). Heike Rauer from the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, added: “We will find planets around their sun-like star in the habitable, the habitable zone: planet on whose surface water may be present and where perhaps even the development of life, as we know it, would be possible. “

The MPS in Göttingen, the data will be evaluated in a data center on the ground. The name of the mission, also Plato, stands for “Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars”. It belongs to the program Cosmic Vision 2015 until 2025. Plato follows the missions CoRoT and Kepler, who discovered many exoplanets and was finished in summer 2013.

21/02/2014, 17:13 Clock | dpa