About the project
This space telescope is currently under development by ESA and scheduled to launch in 2026. PLATO will search for planetary transits across up to one million stars to discover and characterize earth-like extrasolar planets in the habitable zone around sun-like stars. Another objective is to study stellar oscillations or seismic activity in stars to measure their masses, age, and evolution. The mission is designed to observe significantly more stars with greater precision of the measurements. This data will be further enhanced by post-detection investigations such as spectroscopy, asteroseismology, and in some cases imaging. With this method the observation can be expanded to small exoplanets and exoplanets with long orbital periods.
