Space

Space generale (8085)

Synopsis: Space:

The smallest spacecraft in orbit As I type this, there a satellite sitting on the desk in front of me.

but this spacecraft is little bigger than a postage stamp, and around the width of a slice of processed cheese.

It may not look much like a typical spacecraft, but next month, 100 miniature satellites like this one will be blasted into orbit.

The Kicksat project is run by Zac Manchester a graduate student at Cornell University in New york. He raised the money, more than $70, 000,

through the Kickstarter crowd-funding website to enable people to have their own personal spacecraft, known as a sprite.

and here at BBC Future we have been following it for the past two years. he idea is to make space super-cheap

easier than anything that flown into space before. Getting to this point however, has proven far more difficult for Manchester than ever expected.

It also required careful thinking about how to safely launch a hundred tiny bits of potential space debris without them posing a danger to bigger orbiting spacecraft.

loaded with four stacks of the tiny individual sprite satellites. The mothership is scheduled to launch 22 february,

squeezed into a Falcon 9 rocket alongside an International space station (ISS) Dragon supply capsule. here typically a bunch of space left little nooks and crannies

Nasa is flying Kicksat for free as part of its Educational Launch of Nanosatellites programme. Once in orbit, the Falcon 9 will release the Dragon towards the ISS and,

a few minutes later, pop the Kicksat mothership into orbit. The slight delay is to avoid a space debris disaster like the movie Gravity.

It be a risk if 100 tiny satellites end up pinging around the world at high speed in exactly the same orbit as the space station.

The mothership will spend at least seven days in orbit before the sprites themselves are released. here are some space debris mitigation concerns

admits Manchester, ut wee worked with the ISS Program Office to make sure it safe for the ISS.

The spritesorbit is so low that they will only survive for around three days before the upper atmosphere drags them to destruction.

Those fitted with magnetometers like the ones that provide your smartphone compass will transmit data about the Earth magnetic field.

and a bit of know-how, will be able to follow all the spacecraft from the ground. hat wee been able to do with Kicksat is tap into the developments in consumer electronics,

ee using a lot of the components that have been developed for smartphones to make these tiny satellites possible.

Manchester confesses. learned the saying from Nasa that you have to have at least as much weight in paperwork as your satellite weighs,

Indeed, paperwork headaches stopped BBC Future sending its own satellite to space. Due to a mix-up, the particular sprite we had planned was loaded not into the mothership

Happily, we are teaming up with a group based in the East of England the East Anglian Amateur Radio Observatory to track their sprite.

For most of them, this will be the first space mission where they have direct involvement. We can all be rocket scientists now and that certainly not a little thing

creates some unique challenges. ne of the most important aspects of any AR system is the ability to track image, space environments, objects,

and he is convinced that planet-friendly technology has a role to play in the future of motorsport.

Research into atomic-scale memory focuses on the#ability to move single atoms, one of the smallest particles of any element in the universe.#

we could store 100,000 times more information in the same space-instead of one movie, you could store 100,000 movies.

a nation waits with baited breath as a spacecraft door is opened. Slowly an astronaut emerges, the blackness of space behind him.

He gestures to the camera before edging his way out. A few moments later a flag is waved, red with gold stars on it.

This is China's first spacewalk#on 27 september 2008, China became the third nation to independently carry out

what is known in space exploration as an EVA (extra vehicular activity). The man in the suit, Zhai Zhigang, joined Russia's Alexey Leonov and America's Ed white in the history books as his nation's first space walker.

Of course, the then Soviet union and the Americans did this back in the 1960s, a time in

which China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. But decades on, China is catching up.

Its progress in space, when compared with the United states, has been likened to the story of the tortoise and the hare.

the China National Space Administration (CNSA) launched Chang'e-3, a lunar mission named after a Moon goddess with a six-wheeled rover named Yutu,

or Jade Rabbit on board. China has made no secret of its designs on the Moon, with speculation that one of its citizens will walk on the surface within the next ten years.

Could China have an"Apollo moment#within our lifetime? And if it does, should we care?

since the US and Soviet union to put exploratory spacecraft on the Moon#the last time being the Soviet Luna 24 mission in 1976.

Senior Curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum,"help to answer some important questions about the origins of the Moon and geologic processes there.#

but of course, Moon missions have never solely been about science. In September 1961, President John F Kennedy set the US the challenge of landing on the Moon before the end of the decade.

Fuelled by Cold war fears and supposedly by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wanted to take on

They have mastered satellites, commercial launches, deep space and human space flight#completing EVAS, space rendezvous and dockings.

According to Pollpeter,"by the end of the decade the Chinese say they want to move from being

what is classed as a major space power to being a strong space power.##This would put them on par with the US, Russia and Europe.

Within a little more than a decade, the only working space station in orbit could be Chinese. It announced plans to take international astronauts aboard its larger space station,

scheduled for completion at the end of the decade#a time when the International space station may be out of service. While Apollo was about the Cold war,

it is harder to glean the exact motives for China's lunar programme. Pollpeter thinks it is"mainly for symbolic reasons#.

China is in a space race, but it's with other Asian countries like India, Japan, Malaysia and Korea.

whether they can sell satellites or landers. Among the other countries, there has been some comment that China has collected a"string of pearls,

#because of its collaboration with smaller nations assisting with space programmes and satellite launches. And India seems keen to keep up with the Chinese in space achievements,

launching a probe to Mars last month. Although India is still far behind, its efforts to reach a similar level are perceived indicative of the regional strategic benefits.

China wants its share of the commercial launch market worldwide to grow from 3%to 15%by the end of the decade

As with Apollo, China's missions to the Moon could also reap huge technological benefits.

But, as with the US and Soviet union, the early days of China's space programme is military to some extent."

"Ninety-five percent of space technology is considered dual use, meaning of value to both the civilian and military communities,

"China can use space to project power further from its shores, and to more accurately carry out strikes against adversaries.#

#Earlier this year, for example, China's space agency said it launched three satellites to clean up space debris orbiting the Earth:

however, fear that this is actually an anti-satellite weapon programmme, designed to eliminate observation or communication satellites belonging to another country.

The US Department of Defence has stated publicly its concerns. An 83-page Pentagon report on Chinese military developments, issued last May,

or prevent the use of space-based assets by adversaries during times of crisis or conflict.#

#Not that China is the only nation working on space weaponry#America is too#though US law prohibits Nasa from collaborating

Yet the idea of seeing another Apollo-type event may just be a case of wishful thinking, a consequence of perceiving it as the epiphany of the space exploration agenda.

The US supports its space programme, but is reluctant to increase Nasa's funds. Nasa's budget for 2014 is more than a billion less than 2012,

at its lowest levels since 2007.""When the Chinese are standing on the Moon, there will be many members of the US Congress that will proclaim their"shock#at that happening,

and that they would have supported the US space programme with more funding, #says Joan Johnson-Freese,

chair of the Department of National security Studies, at the US Naval War College.""At least that's my personal opinion.

"Funding a space programme is much harder in democracies.##However, Launius believes similar Apollo-style missions may not resonate with the public in the same way as it did four decades ago.

China seems determined to inspire its citizens through its own space achievements. Earlier this year, female taikonaut Wang Yaping gave the first live lesson from space to 60 million students on the effects of zero gravity.

One user posted in response on the social media site Weibo, according to CNN: The US used to be proud of their space class,

(but) now we've made it, too! We should be proud of this. What others have,

Regardless of when or how China chooses to send a manned mission to the Moon,

An astronaut hopped and bounced on the Moon, before placing a flag on its surface. But the flag didn't have the familiar stars-and-stripes pattern.

It was red with gold stars on it. If you would like to comment on this article

or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook or Google+page,

#Africa, Clooney and an unlikely space race What do George Clooney and Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir have in common?

They both have their eyes on space #and in particular, harnessing the satellites orbiting above Africa's skies.

The pair join various governments and companies now looking to harness space research across the African continent.

Although only a handful of countries#such as South africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Morocco#currently have space programmes of their own,

others are racing to catch up, including Ghana and Ethiopia. An ambitious plan is now underway to build an African Space agency called"Afrispace#.

#And while Clooney's contribution to all this may only be a cameo role, it's still an important one.

So what's driving Africa's soaring ambitions for space? And are the plans realistic?

Africa's interest in space arguably began half a century ago, as the US and Soviet union's space race was heating up.

In 1964, a Zambian science teacher named Edward Mukaka Nkoloso appointed himself the director of the Zambia National Academy of Space Research,

and unofficially launched the first#and most eccentric#space programme on the continent. His rather lofty goal was to put a Zambian on the moon before anybody else.

He would stage zero-gravity simulation training by sticking aspiring astronauts into a steel barrel

and rolling them down a hill. While it may be no surprise that Nkoloso's plans failed to lift off

Africa's space industry began to grow, albeit mostly with the help of more developed nations.

In the 1960s, Nasa built one of their Deep space Network stations in Hartebeesthoek, South africa, which supported several early robotic missions to the moon during the Apollo programme.

In the following decades, South africa developed its own space research projects, mostly for military purposes.

In 1970, on behalf of Nasa and with the help of Italian engineers, Kenya launched Uhuru#Swahili for"freedom##the world's first satellite dedicated to celestial X-ray astronomy, from a converted oil platform off its coast.

Taking off Then at the turn of the century, African nations began to ramp up their space efforts. In 2001 Nigeria established its National Space Research and development Agency

and launched its first small satellite in 2003. The satellites it put into the space provide everything from high-resolution imagery to monitor the country's shrinking farmland, to cheaper wireless and internet coverage.

Last year, Ghana launched its Space science and Technology Center, to"foster teaching, learning, commercial application of space research,

#as a precursor to a full-blown space agency by 2016, intended to lead the nation's civilian space exploration efforts.

And Ethiopia#one of the world's poorest countries#has unveiled two new telescopes atop a mountain on the outskirts of Addis ababa

costing around $1. 2 million each. To Western eyes, it may seem rather innappropriate to launch space programmes in Sub-saharan africa,

where nearly 70%of the population still lives on less $2 a day. Yet Joseph Akinyede, director of the African Regional Centre for Space science and Technology Education in Nigeria, an education centre affiliated with the United nations Office for Outer space Affairs,

says that the application of space science technology and research to"basic necessities#of life#health education, energy, food security,

environmental management#is critical for the development of the continent. Much of Africa's recent growth can be linked indirectly to space research.

In particular satellite technology has played a role in everything from telecommunications, broadcasting and GPS mapping to weather forecasting for agriculture and climate monitoring.

Since 2010, satellite capacity across the continent has tripled nearly, helping in part fuel Africa's"mobile revolution#.

#Over 70%of Africans have mobile phones, according to a recent report from Mckinsey, a global consulting firm#and satellites have made often it easier to connect remote areas,

and hold future promise for cheaper satellite-based mobile broadband. Satellite mapping has also been used to discover the continents'vast mineral reserves,

and recently helped uncover an enormous underground water aquifer in Kenya's driest region. To get the most from all this technology on offer, Terefa Waluwa,

chairman of the Ethiopian Space science Society argues that enhancing local expertise via space research is vital."

"It's not to discover the universe again, or re-invent what is known already, but to learn it properly,

"Almost every sector here in Ethiopia is using space science technology, #he says, citing mobile phones, agricultural activities, and aviation."

Nearly all of Africa's space programmes are partnered with foreign countries#arguably limiting their autonomy and control of data and information generated.

#The cost of investing in satellite technology may expensive, but the long term cost of purchasing satellite services from external providers can be even more so.

In light of this, calls are growing from many on the continent#and even the African Union#for the formation of Afrispace, a pan-African space agency.

Clooney has been funding the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), which he co-founded in 2010, to monitor the military activities of al-Bashir#who is accused of war crimes by the International Criminal court.

and so wants more African satellites up there too. Last year, al-Bashir called on attendees at the 4th African Union Conference for Ministers in charge of Communications

#and establish the Afrispace space agency. As it happens, several other African Union ministers already supported the idea of an African space agency,

says Abdul Hakim Elwaer, director of Human resources, Science and Technology for the African Union. An AU working group on space

chaired by South africa, with members representing Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt and Algeria, will present their recommendations on how to make Afrispace a reality to an AU parliament in November next year.

Is an African space agency really achievable though? The African Union has struggled historically to achieve unity and consensus on the continent on a host of issues.

For years, African leaders have seen space investment as"a luxury, at the bottom of the list of priorities,#says Hakim.

if one of the primary drivers of developing national space agencies in Africa is about sovereignty,

The expertise required to rival other large space agencies may also be a long way off#at least judging by the way some existing African space organizations present themselves to the world.

I found that nearly every national space agency or society website was loaded with incomplete or broken content#some were not even functioning.

Our use of space of technology is not to its full potential.##Still, there is no doubt that activity is ramping up across the continent,

and many remain positive that the dream of a pan-African space agency can be achieved.""We know building independent African facilities will not happen overnight,

"See you in space, #he said, before ending the call,"#one day#.#If you would like to comment on this

when they are used to probe big questions about the fundamental nature of matter, space and time.

doughnut-shaped spaceship sitting in the middle of a large green field. Get much closer and youl find researchers trying to better understand how modern car engines work,

Like its much larger sibling at Cern, the circular particle accelerator at Argonne shoots electrons around its 0. 7-mile (1. 1-km) circumference at a tiny fraction below the speed of light.

Nearly three quarters of humans on this planet are tethered practically to their mobile phones. Yet it is only during emergencies that we realise how precious this connection is to our lives.

or requiring separate office spaces for women, have restricted employment opportunities. Shifting sands Times, however, are changing. round 400,000 jobs will be created in the next few years for Saudi women,

#Pedestrian power to shape future cities The most striking change to one of the largest cities on the planet can be seen easily from the air.

All its freeways have been turned into public spaces, their multiple lanes of traffic replaced with extensive linear parks.

There are now 60 million new cars being added to the planet every year, and with those vehicles come more smog,

which#puts the planet's most vulnerable citizens at risk#even by 2020, it's estimated that 78%of the households in China will still not have a car.

and reduce the amount of urban space devoted to cars. These smart cars would act more like a fleet of shared, self-driving taxis.

including making improvements to its urban space that will help make its cities more welcoming to pedestrians.

Wework, a real estate start-up, is quickly expanding its brand of community-driven co-working spaces to San francisco and LA.

A team at the University of Groningen has demonstrated a way to switch off antibiotic agents after just a few hours using warmth or sunlight.

or exposed to sunlight, they reverted to the Z-form, which is all but useless as an antibiotic.

#Edge-of-space planes to free-up congested skies Making predictions about the future of aviation is dangerous;

Jet-rocket hybrideventually, mankind will see long distance travel-London to Sydney, for example-taking place outside the Earth's atmosphere.

Not only is based Virgin galactic in the US, developing a spaceplane that could one day fly between these cities,

but other concepts are being investigated.##In countries such as Britain and Japan, there is research into engines and rival vehicles

which could make space travel a long-haul passenger's reality. In the UK, a company called Skylon has attracted just#60m ($110m) of government funding to develop a futuristic type of engine known as a"reaction engine#.#

but also be able to function outside the atmosphere like a rocket. If that breakthrough comes,

However, these flights are likely to run from dedicated spaceports and it will be some time before mixed-mode airports that can operate both spacecraft

and aircraft become possible. The early space systems will probably involve gliding back to Earth

#which may mean our airports will have to be redesigned to make them useable by these different designs.

The futuristic visions of the 1950s and 60s imagined neighbourhood airports and helicopters in our back gardens-but space travel is more likely.

instead, will take us to the edge of space, efficiently, and allow us to glide effortlessly to our destinations, continents away.

the city was started by developers so there is an abundance of high-quality office and residential spaces.

when multinational companies looked for office space to house thousands of employees in call centres in India,

they make software used for everything from designing car parts to building vehicles sent into space.

Behind them are huge posters of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Nasa's Jet propulsion laboratory used a portfolio of design software made by Siemens to digitally design,

#Why space telescope mirror is most complex ever built"You will not be touching anything.##It is clear from the tone of the technician's voice that this is a command, rather than a suggestion,

Colorado where the mirrors for the $8. 7 billion James webb space telescope (JWST) are being built and tested.

These will enable us to look back in time 13.6 billion years to the immediate aftermath of the Big bang. They will be precise enough to capture single photons.

On tables inside these, sit some of the 18 individual hexagonal mirrors that make up the massive 21ft (6. 5m) diameter primary mirror of this new space telescope."

and then we put a bunch of stuff on the backside to allow us to move it around in space.#

like the Hubble space telescope, the JWST will be launched into space with its mirror out of focus. Only this time, unlike when Hubble was launched,

One shot onlycurrently due for launch in 2018, the JWST will be stationed 1 million miles (1. 5 million km) from Earth#some five times further away from us than the Moon.

This puts additional pressure on the teams of scientists and engineers around the world who are working on this international space telescope,

The telescope will be operating in deep space, at a temperature of#243c(#405f. That's only 30c (86f) above absolute zero, the lowest possible physical temperature.

the telescope will be launched into space with deliberately bumpy mirrors and out of focus optics. The progress of the JWST has been slow and costly.

Led by Nasa, the European space agency and Canada, the project was started more than ten years ago. With the final price tag still to be determined,

only last year there was still talk in Congress of withdrawing Nasa's funding for the mission.

The key instruments for the telescope have been tested and delivered, the structure completed and the (folding) tennis-court sized heat shield finalised.

and integration process at Nasa centres in Washington and Houston.""We know we have only one chance to get it right,

when the final sections are shipped to Nasa at the end of this year.""We love building it, #she says."

Mr Lin's tech incubator appworks provides office space for around 40 start-ups. He says the number of start-ups in Taiwan has doubled at least in the past three years to several thousand.

The Solar impulse plane has crossed just successfully the US in five stages#from San francisco to New york. And the world's largest solar-powered boat, the Turanor Planet Solar,

when powered only by the Sun . If you would like to comment on this slideshow or anything else you have seen on Future,

where incubators and start-ups compete for space among the coffee shops and restaurants. There are similar tech hubs in many cities throughout the world,

just another in the existing KH-11 satellite constellation, which uses electro-optical imaging. But officials have hinted also at new surveillance capabilities,

reveal a host of top-secret satellites, such as the intriguingly named Quasar and Intruder. The documents,

which the Washington post redacted, provide no specific details on these satellites'capabilities, however. High Power Microwave Weaponsimagine a weapon that can knock out all the computers in a Syrian military command centre without killing a single person.

That's the idea behind high power microwave weapons which are designed to destroy electronics without causing any physical damage.

Flower power, a device due to be launched towards the end of this year by Paris-based wireless tech company Parrot, measures sunlight, soil moisture, temperature and nutrient levels in plants,

and whether they should be moved to change sunlight levels. Flower power and related technologies could be vital in developing countries with dry climates.

#Exoplanets: New missions hunting for alien worlds As mountains go, Cerro Armazones may not be much to look at.

But for astronomers like Joe Liske, this is arguably the world's most interesting mountain right now,

or European Extremely Large telescope. With a mirror that is 39 metres (128ft) in diameter, the E-ELT will dwarf all existing optical telescopes

#and those planned to appear in the next decade or two. And it won't just bring plenty of life to this corner of the Atacama.

The hope is that it will also help spot life out in the vastness of space.

In the past decade alone, astronomers have been discovering planets outside our solar system or exoplanets, with astonishing speed.

We now have identified nearly a thousand. Most are much bigger than Earth and almost certainly Jupiter-like gas giants, making making them quite unlikely for hosting life.

None has so far been confirmed to bear life#even single-cell organisms #but some of these planets seem to be distinctly rocky and Earthlike:

Kepler-62e, Gliese-581g and Kepler 22b, to name but a few.""The quest for Earthlike exoplanets, and ultimately life on such planets, is one of the great frontiers of science, perhaps the last big piece in the puzzle of how we, humans,

fit into the big picture,#says Liske, who works at the European Southern Observatory, an organisation that already operates a number of telescopes in the Chilean desert.

Two of the more high-profile planet hunters have hit rocky ground in recent months, however.

The french-led Corot spacecraft, launched in 2006, greatly outlived its original two-and-a-half year mission of spotting terrestrial-sized exoplanets,

but in November 2012, it suffered a computer malfunction, which made it impossible to send any data back to Earth.

In June 2013, The french Space agency announced it would switch the satellite off and let it burn up as it re-enters the atmosphere#the usual fate of our mechanical helpers in space.

Nasa's $600 million space observatory Kepler, launched in 2009, has also been crippled recently. Kepler has helped spot thousands of potential exoplanets#over 130

of which have been confirmed #but two of its four reaction wheels that control the telescope's direction have failed in recent months,

and at least three are necessary to point it in the right direction. Kepler completed its primary mission in November 2012,

and there are still thousands of candidates to sift through, but this month Nasa conceded that Kepler will no longer be able to search for exoplanets.

Thankfully, more planet-hunting missions are on the way, which will continue and even extend upon their legacy.

Missions like the E-ELT, which Liske says"will completely revolutionise the exoplanet field.##Size mattersto be considered a"habitable#world,

a planet has to be similar to Earth in size, rocky, and located in the so-called Goldilocks zone#an area of space around a parent star that is not too cold or too hot,

but just right to support liquid water. Since these planets are expected to be small and faint compared to their sun,

spotting them is tricky with existing ground-based optical telescopes.""It's like trying to see the light from a feeble little LED 10cm away from a stadium floodlight,

from a distance of 200km,#says Liske. To tell a parent star and a potentially habitable planet apart,

astronomers need incredibly sharp, high-resolution pictures. The bigger the mirror, the sharper the image a telescope can capture,

and the dimmer the objects it can detect. Hence it takes an extremely large telescope to try to spot any planets that may support alien life many light years away.

Currently, the world's largest ground-based optical telescope is Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary islands

Spain, with a mirror of 10. 4m (34. 1ft) in diameter. Then there are Keck 1 and Keck 2 in Hawaii, each sporting a 10m (32. 8ft) mirror."

"With the E-ELT, we believe that we will be able to directly see exoplanets similar to Earth out to a distance of about 20 light years,

#says Liske. The closest potentially habitable planet is about seven light years away, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So if aliens there are as eager to spot us as we are them, by the time the E-ELT opens in the early 2020s,

they would be receiving light from Earth from today. To them, Armazones would still look intact.

Mirror imagewhile astronomers wait for the E-ELT to be constructed other telescopes are busy scanning the skies for faraway worlds.

About an hour's dusty and boulder-strewn drive away from Armazones is another telescope, whose four huge towers resemble some kind of factory rather than a scientific facility.

It is the VLT #or Very Large telescope, composed of four individual 8. 2m (26. 9ft) mirrors#based at Cerro Paranal,

another mountain in the Atacama shorn of its top. The VLT's mirrors may not hold any size records but in 2004,

it spotted the first exoplanet to be observed directly, 2m1207b, approximately 170 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

Since then the VLT has discovered several worlds outside the Solar system, with the help of an instrument called NACO.

NACO is part of the VLT's adaptive optics (AO) system, and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii uses a similar system.

The technology corrects for the blurriness caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere that makes stars twinkle

but gives astronomers headaches. NACO cancels out the turbulence, producing images as sharp as if snapped in space.

But even with these adaptive optics tools, existing ground-based telescopes can only"see#planets bigger than Jupiter#gas giants that orbit their parent stars at a huge distance.

The next-generation of AO instruments Sphere for the VLT and Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) for the Gemini Telescope in Chile"will blow NACO and Keck AO away#,according to Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

But while GPI and Sphere will make it possible to spot exoplanets of similar size to Jupiter#even these will still be too big to be considered habitable.

That's why astronomers put so much hope in the coming generation of optical giants. Besides the E-ELT, two other observatories have recently been given the go-ahead:

the Giant magellan telescope (GMT) in Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna kea in Hawaii.

The GMT will have seven 8. 4m (27. 6ft) mirrors, arranged like flower petals. Together they will make up a primary mirror 24. 5m (80. 4ft) in diameter.

The TMT will have segmented a 30m (98. 4ft) mirror consisting of 492 small individual hexagonal mirrors, each 1. 4m (4. 6ft) across.

E-ELT, GMT and TMT will all be equipped with tools for exoplanet search, and are expected to be able to peer so deep into the universe

so that they could take direct images of relatively small Earthlike worlds some 20-or-so light-years away.

Defying gravitybut they won't be the only ones on the hunt. Telescopes can produce much clearer images in space,

free from our turbulent atmosphere. The Hubble space telescope has been circling Earth since 1990 and has spotted a few planets

#and also helped determine what some extra-solar worlds are made probably of. But Hubble's 2. 4m (7. 9ft) mirror is too small to see planets smaller than Jupiter,

says Matt Mountain, the director of the Space telescope Science Institute at Nasa. Hubble's planned successor, the James webb space telescope (JWST)# set to go into orbit around 2018#is expected to do much more.

Equipped with a 6. 5-metre (21ft) diameter mirror JWST will have a variety of tasks,

among them the search for planets orbiting nearby stars. It will work in the infrared spectrum,

which will allow it to"probe down to smaller planetary sizes than Hubble, to roughly two-to-three times larger than Earth,

more Neptune-scale planets,#says Mountain. The telescope will aim to find out whether these extra-solar worlds are so-called"super-Earths##rocky planets that could potentially be habitable#or miniature versions of Neptune,

unable to support life. Using an instrument called a coronagraph, JWST will try to determine

whether a planet has an atmosphere, and#for the first time#analyse it by examining the spectrum of the light coming from the planet.

Elements and molecules in an atmosphere, such as water and oxygen, have specific signatures in the spectrum,

giving us an idea about its composition and the likelihood that there is liquid water present

#and hence life, says Avi Loeb, Chair of the Astronomy department at Harvard university. Spotting water and oxygen would be just the start,

though, says Liske.""If you found things like water, oxygen, CO, methane, in the right amounts, that would be a strong hint of life.

Then of course there would be lots of investigations into whether such a combination of elements could be produced by non-biological processes,

#he says.""If we are ever in the situation where we've convinced ourselves that we've found life,

then the question would be#what kind of life'?'If we're lucky we may be able to say something about the exoplanet's surface:

is it all water? Any signs of vegetation? That sort of thing could come in principle from either ground

or space-based telescopes.##Sic transit gloriaas exciting as the plans for direct imaging are,

most exoplanets are still found using indirect techniques#such as detecting a wobble in the position of the star that indicates it is being pulled slightly towards an orbiting planet,

or a method called"transiting#,in which planets are identified by the tiny dip in brightness caused

when they pass in front of its star. Transiting was used to great success by Kepler, but the method doesn't allow us to calculate a planet's mass#a critical factor in determining its density and hence its rockiness.

To determine the mass another instrument enters the stage#a spectrograph. One such device, the High accuracy radial velocity planet searcher (Harps), is mounted on a 3. 6m-(11. 8ft-)mirror telescope at La Silla, another one of ESO's observatories in the Atacama.

It studies space bodies by recording how a planet's gravity makes its parent star appear to vibrate as it rotates around it.

It can use that vibration to detect new planets, but has also been used to learn more about known exoplanets.

It determined that an exoplanet discovered by Corot in September 2009 some 500 light-years away

and dubbed Corot-7b had a rocky surface and a mass only five times of our Earth.

This would make it a likely habitable candidate if it wasn't for its proximity to its parent star#the planet lies only 2. 5 million km (1. 6 million miles) away from it,

which is just 1/23rd of the distance from the Sun to Mercury.""By far the most powerful combination right now is the combination of transit detections and Doppler spectroscopy,

which gives you both the mass and radius of the planet, so you can start to say what it's made of,

#says Macintosh.""Unfortunately, this combination has been hard to do for many of the most interesting cases,

because the odds that any single planet discovered by Doppler will also transit are very low,

and the huge numbers of transit planets discovered by Kepler are all orbiting relatively faint stars

#because Kepler was designed to look at faint stars.##The worlds discovered by Kepler are also thousands of light-years away#totally inaccessible to direct imaging,

so it is impossible to determine whether or not any of them host life. But one more player is set to emerge soon.

In April this year, Nasa gave the go-ahead to another space-based mission that will work similar to Kepler,

but can discern planets around bright nearby stars: Tess, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Due to launch in 2017,

when Tess finds a potentially habitable planet, just as with Kepler, other tools will come into play to find out more about them,

to determine whether they are super-earths or micro-Neptunes.""The big ground-based telescopes can work with it

and do the spectroscopy, #says Macintosh.""And if Tess finds a habitable planet around a very nearby star,

you can then use the James webb space telescope to measure the composition of its atmosphere.##But to really find a habitable Earth-twin orbiting a star just like our Sun,

we will have to go to space, he adds#with a giant telescope fully designed for planet hunting

and equipped with a mirror of eight metres or more. That won't happen any time soon

#but Nasa is already thinking about a future JWST replacement, called the Advanced Technology Large Aperture Space telescope (ATLAST),

a space telescope with a 8-to-16m mirror that would be 2, 000 times more light-sensitive than Hubble.

If all goes according to plan, ATLAST could be launched between 2025 and 2035. The fact that there have been few good candidates for planets that host life found so far should not discourage the searchers The data already collected suggests that there are about 100 billion planetary systems in our galaxy alone,

says Mountain. So there are plenty of places left to look, as and when we find the tools for the task.

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