An international  team of astronomers measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using the 2.5-meter Nordic Optical Telescope on the island of La Palma, Spain, a moderate-sized facility. The transit of the  exoplanet named 55 Cancri e is the shallowest detected from the ground yet. Detecting a transit is the first step in analyzing a planet’s atmosphere, so according to the researchers this success will be helpful for characterizing the many small planets that upcoming space missions are expected to discover in the next few years.

Until now, scientists have been able to observe the transits of only one other super-Earth named GJ 1214b circling a red dwarf  with ground-based telescopes. The Earth’s roiling air makes such observations extremely difficult. But the team’s success with 55 Cancri e raises the prospects of characterizing dozens of super-Earths likely to be revealed by upcoming surveys.

“Our observations show that we can detect the transits of small planets around Sun-like stars using ground-based telescopes,” says Ernst de Mooij of Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom, lead author of the study.

He also mentions that this achievement will help upcoming space missions such as TESS and PLATO should find many small planets around bright stars.

TESS is a NASA mission scheduled for launch in 2017, while PLATO is to be launched in 2024 by the European Space Agency; both will search for transiting terrestrial planets around nearby bright stars.

According to co-author of the study; Mercedes Lopez-Morales of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) this result is helping them close in on the detection of the atmospheres of small planets with ground-based telescopes. “We are slowly paving the way toward the detection of bio-signatures in Earth-like planets around nearby stars,” he mentions.