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The European Space Agency will launch an observatory into space designed to seek out potentially habitable planets outside of our solar system. The PLATO — Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars — mission will search for planets by monitoring the brightness of up to a million nearby stars. The mission will search for habitable planets The space-based observatory will use 34 separate small telescopes and cameras to watch for tiny, regular drops in their targets brightness: a sign that a planet is passing in front of the star. The ESA says the mission will have an emphasis on discovering and characterizing Earth-sized planets and super-Earths inside their parent stars habitable zone, which could potentially support the existence of both water and life.