Google Asked to Join Exo-Planet Search Effort

After the success achieved in the last years in the collaboration with NASA's Ames Research Center, which included the mapping of stars and that of the surfaces of different bodies in the solar system, the Internet search giant Google is now showing interest in expanding its development towards providing other useful information such as maps of exo-planets. The Transiting Exoplanet Survery Satellite with its wide-field digital cameras will have the role of studying near bright stars, in the hope to find new exo-planets.

When it will be completed and launched into space in 2012, Google is expected to help process the massive amount of data generated by the satellite. MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research project leader, George R. Ricker, says that: "Decades, or even centuries after the TESS survery is completed, the new planetary systems it discovers will continue to be studied because they are both nerby and bright." Some of these new exo-planets we are discovering today, or which will be discovered in the near future, could one day become the new home to human colonists departing our solar system.