Do you know Plato, the European space telescope that will hunt exoplanets?
The 24 cameras are now installed on the optical bay of the future ESA space telescope. © ESA – P. Sebirot
The recent election of Donald Trump and his ideological attacks as well as its budget cuts Against the world of sciences are undoubtedly a golden opportunity for Europe to occupy even more the field of investments and discoveries. In the past ten years, ESA has accomplished major missions which are references in the spatial and astronomical world: we can evoke Planck, Rosetta, or Euclid and juice more recently.
The future Plato space telescope (for Planetary Transits and Oscilations of Stars), or “Plato” in French, from the Cosmic Vision program is part of this logic. Plato will be to chase terrestrial type exoplanets. It is classified M, that is to say that its cost is capped at 470 million euros. He will have to take off for the point LAGRANGE L2 (like the James-Webb), about 1.5 million km from the earth, aboard an Ariane 6 next year.
What if Europe discovered the exoterre that everyone is looking for?
Vision of Plato artist deployed in space. © ESA
Plato will observe 200,000 stars and will be able to dive its 24 cameras in about 5% of the sky each time. He will use two methods of detecting exoplanets, like his ancestor Corot:
- The so -called transit method (photometric method): by identifying the cyclic cuts of brightness of a star we deduce the passage of an object between the star and the observer whose size it remains to be determined. Just under half of the exoplanets were found by this technique.
- Asterosismology: The tiny oscillations of the star indicate the presence and the position of an exoplanet around it.
Transit detection method. © NASA
An exoterre, Plato’s objective, is therefore a rocky planet whose astronomers can precisely measure the mass and the diameter thanks to measurements supplemented by ground instruments.
Plato has 26 cameras for this, the newly installed 24, plus two “fast” cameras.
“” It is rewarding to see the progress we have made since last year when the montage work on cameras began: with 24 cameras in place, we see plato taking its good shape “Comments Thomas Walloschek, head of the Plato project of ESA, who adds:
“” This activity is one of the most important for the construction of the satellite. The cameras are delicate elements which must be attached to the support structure of the space machine with great precision, in order to ensure that they are very precisely aligned ».
Plato will operate in the visible spectrum and will be responsible for observing stars of a magnitude apparent between 4 and 16.
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