| Jul 18, 2024 |
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(Nanowerk News) Europe’s next big space mission – a telescope that will hunt for Earth-like rocky planets outside of our solar system – is on course to launch at the end of 2026.
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PLATO, or PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, is being built to find nearby potentially habitable worlds around Sun-like stars that we can examine in detail.
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The space telescope will blast into orbit on Europe’s new rocket, Ariane-6, which made its maiden flight last week after being developed at a cost of €4billion.
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| An artist’s impression of the European Space Agency’s PLATO spacecraft. (Image: ESA)
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Dr David Brown, of the University of Warwick, is giving an update on the mission at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull this week.
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“PLATO’s goal is to search for exoplanets around stars similar to the Sun and at orbital periods long enough for them to be in the habitable zone,” he said.
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“One of the main mission objectives is to find another Earth-Sun equivalent pair, but it is also designed to carefully and precisely characterise the exoplanets that it finds (i.e. work out their masses, radii, and bulk density).”
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PLATO isn’t just an exoplanet hunter, however. It is also a stellar science mission.
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As well as searching for exoplanets it will study the stars using a range of techniques including asteroseismology (measuring the vibrations and oscillations of stars) to work out their masses, radii, and ages.
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Unlike most space telescopes, PLATO has multiple cameras – including a UK-named one called ArthurEddington, after the famous astronomer and physicist who won the Royal Astronomical Society’s prestigious Gold Medal in 1924.
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It has 24 ‘Normal’ cameras (N-CAMs) and 2 ‘Fast’ cameras (F-CAMs). The N-CAMs are arranged into four groups of six cameras, with the cameras in each group pointing in the same direction but the groups slightly offset.
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This gives PLATO a very large field of view, improved scientific performance, redundancy against failures, and a built-in way to identify ‘false positive’ signals that might mimic an exoplanet transit, Dr Brown explained.
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“The planned observing strategy is to stare at two patches of sky, one in the North and one in the South, for two years each,” he added.
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“The Southern patch of sky has been chosen, while the Northern patch won’t be confirmed for another few years.”
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Several of the spacecraft’s components have finished their manufacturing programmes and are close to completing their calibration tests. This includes the UK-provided Front-End Electronics (FEE) for the N-CAMs.
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Built by the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of University College London, these operate the cameras, digitise the images, and transfer them to the onboard data processing.
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Ten of the final cameras have been built and tested and the first of these was mounted onto the optical bench – the surface which keeps all cameras pointed in the right direction – earlier this year.
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The mission is on track to launch in December 2026.
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