14 DAY TRIAL // The PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars) observatory is one of the three missions that share a £3.65 million (about $5.8 million US) development grant from the UK Space Agency, and it could be one of the two projects selected to be fully developed.
If chosen in June 2011, this new European space observatory, which is a part of the European Space Agency's Cosmic Vision program, could help the search for life-bearing planets beyond our solar system.
Two of the three chosen missions will be fully developed for launch in 2014 and 2020, and for this, PLATO has to compete with Euclid and Solar Orbiter.
Euclid is an observatory that would analyze the nature of dark energy and dark matter and Solar Orbiter would get closer to the sun, more than any previous solar-observing mission has ever had.
The PLATO spacecraft should use the transit technique to look for alien planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, in the Milky Way galaxy, as it is designed to detect subtle change within the luminosity of a star's emitted light.
These slim changes could indicate that there is a planet orbiting the star and that it transits in front of it partially obscuring the light it emits.
If the PLATO mission is chosen, the scientific instruments of the spacecraft will be designed and its building will be financed by the United Kingdom and other ESA member states.
Pollacco said that in this case, the PLATO spacecraft will be launched between 2017 and 2020, on a Russian Soyuz Fregat rocket.
“We hope it will be powerful enough to detect rocky planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars, those regions around a star where liquid water can exist. In other words, it could find new earths,” he added, as reported by SPACE.com.