Nasa is set to launch the world's most powerful telescope in 2018 in the hope that it will help find alien worlds.
But using powerful probes such as the James Webb telescope could prove ineffective, according to one research group.
Instead, they want to launch a swarm of palm-sized satellites that could collect more data on potentially habitable worlds in less time for less money.
The tiny satellites are known as 'Cubesats' and usually measure no more than 10cm cubed and with a mass of no more than 1.33kg.
The idea has been proposed by Ameer Blake, an undergraduate student at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
He is studying the possibility of using cubesat to search for a new planet around the star Beta Pictoris.
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