The PLATO mission (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) has finally been approved by ESA within its Cosmic Vision program in which Spain participates significantly with researchers from AstroMadrid and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC). Your objective will be to search for planets that orbit relatively close stars with the intention of locating Earth-like stars, that is, habitable planets. It is the worthy successor to the Kepler mission.
The medium-sized mission, which will cost ESA no more than 600 million euros, will consist of a space observatory made up of 34 small telescopes with only twelve centimeters in diameter and separate cameras, mounted on a platform; Each telescope will generate an image of 80 million pixels with a cadence of 25 seconds, which will have to be analyzed automatically by the 16 on-board computers. The two key study fronts will be:
– The investigation of the seismic activity of the stars, whose data data will allow the calculation of the mass and radius of a planet, and therefore its density, which will provide a good clue about its composition.
– The search for exoplanets in around a million stars that are distributed in the middle of the sky, emphasizing the possibility of discovering planets similar to Earth or super-Earths , where liquid water could exist on the surface and, therefore , lifetime.
“Their discoveries will help to place the architecture of our own Solar System in the context of other planetary systems,” said Álvaro Giménez, Director of Science and Robotics Exploration at ESA.
PLATO, scheduled to launch in 2024 , will depart on a Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, on a six-year mission and operate 1,500,000 kilometers from Earth as seen from the Sun. In an initial estimate, scientists believe After the mission’s first three years of operation, hundreds of Earth-like planets will have been discovered at distances from their star similar to the one that separates us from the Sun.
