Space is rarely out of the news these days, what with yesterday’s shuttle flight, the continual reports of extra-solar planets and the upcoming 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s little adventure. Amid all the press from the big space agencies, it’s easy to forget that the UK plays a very important role in space, especially in satellite and instrument technology.

A good example is the EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory) project. This proposed space telescope would scan the habitable zones of stars for Earth-like planets. Better yet, it would be able to detect atmospheric compositions of gases such as ozone, methane and carbon dioxide. Crunch the data on these gases and you might just be able to infer the presence of life on the extrasolar world.

The EChO mission would be led by a team from University College London and, specifically, Dr Giovanna Tinetti, from the UCL Department of Physics and Astronomy. If you follow such things,Tinetti’s name will be familiar from the 2007 study that first found signs of water on an exoplanet.

In a kind of extra-planetary X-Factor, EChO has been shortlisted from an original pool of 47 proposals. It is now one of four remaining projects vying for the European Space Agency’s 2020-22 medium-class mission. Its competitors include a probe to study the edges of black holes, a sample-return mission to a near-Earth asteroid, and a machine to measure space-time curvature.