Launch is getting closer for the European Space Agency’s Plato satellite, which will look for planets similar to Earth orbiting the habitable zone of stars thanks to the delivery of crucial mission electronics by a team led by UCL.
Launched in late 2026, the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (Plato) mission will scan a wide region of the sky for thousands of relatively bright stars. It will look for tiny, regular dips in brightness caused by the planets passing in front of the stars, temporarily obstructing some of the starlight. Astronomers will be able to characterize the characteristics of the planets and their host stars through the examination of these transits and changes in brightness.
The satellite’s array of 26 tiny telescopes and cameras will be used to do this. The Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) at UCL researchers designed, built, and tested the read-out electronics for these cameras, which can read the content of over 80 million pixels in four seconds for each camera. These electronics have now been delivered to the Centre Spatial de Liege (Liege space center) in Belgium. The UK Space Agency provided support for this research.
After delivery, the modules are combined with the flight optics to create cameras, and more testing is done prior to the assemblies being installed on the German-built Plato spacecraft.
More than 5,000 exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system, have been discovered by astronomers thus far. However, none of them have yet been demonstrated to be genuinely Earth-like in terms of their size and distance from a Sun like our own.
The “habitable zone,” or the distance from a star where liquid water may exist on the surface, is where Plato will look for planets.
Co-investigator of the Plato project, Professor Alan Smith of UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, stated: “Plato will be a ground-breaking mission with a capability beyond any that has gone before.” By focusing on relatively bright stars and collaborating with our ground-based observers, we will significantly advance our knowledge of how planets evolve.
Our delivery of the read-out electronics is a significant accomplishment, even if there is still work to be done in analyzing the enormous amount of data we have gathered. I would want to express my gratitude to the hardworking team at MSSL for making this possible over the past ten years.
The MSSL team collaborated with UK businesses Spur Electron Ltd., which put together 13 of the electronics boards in accordance with MSSL’s design, and Teledyne Ltd., which produced the CCDs (charge coupled devices, which turn photons into electrons).
Using vacuum chambers at MSSL that replicate the conditions of space, the team there also carried out a thorough calibration of each sensor (the electronics and CCDs).
Plato will launch into space and reach Lagrange point 2, which is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction opposite the Sun. During its four-year normal mission, the telescope will observe over 200,000 stars from this point on.
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