The ESA mission PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) shal be lanched in 2026 with an Ariane 6 rocket. The satellite shall operate from Lagrange point L2 of the Earth -Sun system.
With 26 cameras, each equipped with more than 80 million pixels, Plato shall provide spectrophotometric observations for about 250 000 stars, continuously for several years. The scientific objective is to characterise the exoplanetary transits around stars, including rocky planets in the habitable zone.
At the same time the long temporal series of photometric observations with ultra-high precision will allow to determine stellar oscillations and, thanks to asteroseismology it shall be possoble to determine in areliable manner, masses radii and ages of theh stars, including those that host exoplanetes.
The Research Group Stars and Galaxies is strongly involved in the design and building of PLATO. It provides the onboard software that shall be able to deal with 260000 stars each 25 seconds to provide liht curves of the sources. In the context if the PLATO Data Centre the personnel of the Research Group Stars and Galaxies leads the work package “Data Processing Algorithms” (WP3), and has also the responsiblity for the development and validation of the validation of the light curves acquired by the onboard software. In the context of the Science Preparation Management, The Research Group Stars and Galaxies has the responsibility of defining the procedures for the characterisation of the stars and the computation of grids of stellar models necessary for the interpretation of the data.
