RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – More than a dozen scientists from 11 Brazilian institutions are helping in the construction and assembly of Plato, the satellite that will attempt to find a rocky planet closer to ours in size, orbiting a star like our Sun, at a distance with the basic conditions to shelter life.
According to astronomer and astrophysicist Eduardo Janot Pacheco, of the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of São Paulo (USP), and coordinator of the Plato-Brazil committee, the new satellite will combine high photometric precision with a wide field of vision.
The equipment will cover an area in the sky approximately 20 times greater than that covered by NASA’s Kepler, the largest satellite to study exoplanets ever launched, and which was also tasked with trying to find new Earths.
NASA‘s satellite’s most common findings were bodies unlike any other in our Solar System. Meanwhile, other satellites and telescopes have also found small, rocky planets, roughly the size of the Earth, in theoretically habitable areas, at a distance from its stars that may allow liquid water.
But we are still looking for more similar conditions to ours on earth.
Plato should continue operating for approximately six and a half years. Every two years, it will aim for the same area in space where it can see 270,000 stars simultaneously.
By the end of its expedition, it could have observed as many as one million stars.
Source: O Estado de S. Paulo