Searching for planets going around stars other than the sun has not been cheap. corot (Convection Rotation et Transits planetaires), a French planet-hunting satellite that was operational from 2007 to 2013, cost €17501 ($22om). Kepler, an American one that was launched in 2009 and went wrong in 2013, cost $6oom. But a group of graduate students at Stuttgart University, in Germany, think they can do better. A lot better. They propose to do the job for €7m. Johannes Mathies, Steffen Mauceri, Lu-kas Pfeiffer and Marco Vietze are part of a movement which believes that, because electronics have become smaller, better and cheaper, satellites can follow suit, and thus cease to be the preserve of governments and large corporations. They call their proposal (details of which are published in Acta Astronautica) the Small Satellite for Exoplanetary Transit Observation, or sseto.
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