PLATO: the ESA mission for exo-planets discovery

Magrin, Demetrio; Ragazzoni, Roberto; Rauer, H.; Pagano, I.; Nascimbeni, V.; Piotto, G.; Viotto, Valentina; Piazza, Daniele; Bandy, T.; Basso, S.; Benz, W.; Bergomi, Maria; Biondi, Federico; Borsa, F.; Börner, Anko; Brandeker, Alexis; Brändli, Mathias; Bruno, Giordano; Cabrera, J.; Calderone, Flavia; Cessa, Virginie; Chinellato, Simonetta; Roche, Thierry De; Dima, Marco; Erikson, A.; Farinato, Jacopo; Ghigo, M.; Greggio, Davide; Klebor, Maximilian; Marafatto, Luca; Munari, Matteo; Mogulsky, Valery; Pertenaïs, Martin; Peter, G.; Portaluri, Elisa; Rieder, Martin; Rockstein, Steve; Schweitzer, Mario; Sicilia, D.; Umbriaco, Gabriele; Wieser, Matthias; Heras, A. M.; Marliani, F.; Pirrotta, Simone; Salatti, M.; Tommasi, E.; Bardazzi, R.; Battistelli, E.; Brotini, Mauro; Burresi, Matteo; Capuano, Emanuele; Marinai, Massimo; Novi, Andrea; Catala, C.

doi:10.1117/12.2313538

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Of course such synergies can be improved if a new NIR astrometry mission can partially see into the disc and centre of the Galaxy where many of the double white dwarfs are found. • PLATO [147,161,196], TESS [200] and beyond: There are also synergies with the many upcoming exoplanet surveys, generally space astrometry addresses very long period massive exoplanets, while other transit and radial velocity exoplanet surveys are aimed at shorter period exoplanets. We have shown using numerical studies (see Section 3.14) that the combination of two missions with a 20 year gap can yield exoplanets with periods of 30-40 years allowing the coplanarity of these systems to be studied with multi-mission data.…”

Section: Space Missionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

All-sky visible and near infrared space astrometry

et al. 2021

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The era of all-sky space astrometry began with the Hipparcos mission in 1989 and provided the first very accurate catalogue of apparent magnitudes, positions, parallaxes and proper motions of 120 000 bright stars at the milliarcsec (or milliarcsec per year) accuracy level. Hipparcos has now been superseded by the results of the Gaia mission. The second Gaia data release contained astrometric data for almost 1.7 billion sources with tens of microarcsec (or microarcsec per year) accuracy in a vast volume of the Milky Way and future data releases will further improve on this. Gaia has just completed its nominal 5-year mission (July 2019), but is expected to continue in operations for an extended period of an additional 5 years through to mid 2024. Its final catalogue to be released $\sim $ ∼ 2027, will provide astrometry for $\sim $ ∼ 2 billion sources, with astrometric precisions reaching 10 microarcsec. Why is accurate astrometry so important? The answer is that it provides fundamental data which underpin much of modern observational astronomy as will be detailed in this White Paper. All-sky visible and Near-InfraRed (NIR) astrometry with a wavelength cutoff in the K-band is not just focused on a single or small number of key science cases. Instead, it is extremely broad, answering key science questions in nearly every branch of astronomy while also providing a dense and accurate visible-NIR reference frame needed for future astronomy facilities.

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Section: Space Missionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

All-sky visible and near infrared space astrometry

et al. 2021

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“…PLAnetary Transit and Oscillations of stars (PLATO, launch expected in 2026) is a ESA transit survey mission devoted to the detection and prime planet parameters characterization for new planets orbiting bright stars [187,188]. The photometric perfomances that PLATO will achieve are light curves that are precise enough to detect and determine the radius of an Earth-sized planet around a G0V star of m V = 10 mag with an accuracy of 3%.…”

Section: Platomentioning

confidence: 99%

Biosignatures Search in Habitable Planets

Claudi

Alei

2019

Galaxies

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The search for life has had a new enthusiastic restart in the last two decades thanks to the large number of new worlds discovered. The about 4100 exoplanets found so far, show a large diversity of planets, from hot giants to rocky planets orbiting small and cold stars. Most of them are very different from those of the Solar System and one of the striking case is that of the super-Earths, rocky planets with masses ranging between 1 and 10 M ⊕ with dimensions up to twice those of Earth. In the right environment, these planets could be the cradle of alien life that could modify the chemical composition of their atmospheres. So, the search for life signatures requires as the first step the knowledge of planet atmospheres, the main objective of future exoplanetary space explorations. Indeed, the quest for the determination of the chemical composition of those planetary atmospheres rises also more general interest than that given by the mere directory of the atmospheric compounds. It opens out to the more general speculation on what such detection might tell us about the presence of life on those planets. As, for now, we have only one example of life in the universe, we are bound to study terrestrial organisms to assess possibilities of life on other planets and guide our search for possible extinct or extant life on other planetary bodies. In this review, we try to answer the three questions that also in this special search, mark the beginning of every research: what? where? how?

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“…Each camera consists of three main components. The Telescope Optical Unit (TOU) bears the optical elements; 9 the Focal Plane Array 10 11 (FPA) bears the four 4510 × 4510 pixels CCD detectors and the Front End Electronics (FEE) contains the readout electronics. 12 The payload is composed of 4 groups of 6 cameras pointing at the same portion of the sky.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alignment and integration of the first PLATO camera

Royer

Baeke

Terrasa

et al. 2022

Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2022: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave

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PLATO is an exoplanet hunting mission of the European Space Agency. It is a medium-class mission, with a launch foreseen in 2026. Its prime objective is to uncover Earth-sized planets residing in their habitable zone.The payload consists in 26 cameras with a very wide field of view. These cameras consist in a Telescope Optical Unit, aligned at ambient and characterised at the operational temperature, and a Focal Plane Array bearing the detectors, and delivered after coupling with the Front End Electronics.In this contribution, we report on the alignment of the Engineering Model camera of Plato, i.e., the input metrology, the mechanical alignment of the optical unit with the focal plane array, the test environment and the optical characterisation throughout the process until the integrity check after delivery to the cryo-vacuum testing facility where the camera underwent a thorough performance demonstration. We also give a detailed description of the bolting process and the associated error budget.

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PLATO: the ESA mission for exo-planets discovery

Cited by 9 publications

References 13 publications

All-sky visible and near infrared space astrometry

All-sky visible and near infrared space astrometry

Biosignatures Search in Habitable Planets

Alignment and integration of the first PLATO camera

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