The European Space Agency's (ESA) Plato space telescope will be launched at the end of 2026. The "Plato" space telescope is being built to search for potentially habitable planets near the solar system, surrounding sun-like stars, for detailed human study. It will be launched into orbit by Europe's new rocket Ariane 6, which cost about 4 billion euros (approximately 31.5 billion yuan) to develop and made its first flight last week.
The Plato telescope is more than just an exoplanet hunter, it's also a stellar science mission. As well as searching for exoplanets, it will study stars using a range of techniques including asteroseismology (measuring a star's vibrations and oscillations) to work out their mass, radius and age.
Unlike most space telescopes, Plato has multiple cameras, including 24 "regular" cameras (N-CAM) and 2 "fast" cameras (F-CAM). The 24 "regular" cameras are divided into four groups of six cameras. Each group of cameras points in the same direction, but is slightly offset between groups.
Experts explain that this provides the "Plato" telescope with a very large field of view, improved scientific performance, redundancy to prevent malfunctions, and built-in methods to identify "false positive" signals that may mimic exoplanet transmissions.