ESA's PLATO Mission

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is ESA’s M3 mission and designed to detect and characterize extrasolar planets. PLATO will provide small planets around bright stars, including terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars. PLATO will characterize these planets for their radius, mass, and age with high accuracy.

PLATO is currently scheduled for a launch date end of 2026. Its payload consists of 26 cameras with 12cm aperture each. For at least four years, the mission will perform high-precision, long-term photometric, and asteroseismic monitoring of a large number of stars to detect extrasolar planets and derive their radii and ages. The satellite data are complemented by a ground-based observing program to derive the planetary masses.

The mission's catalog of well-characterized small planets at intermediate orbital periods will be an important constraint to planet formation theories and will provide targets for future spectroscopy follow-up observations to characterize planetary atmospheres. These data will be a significant step forward to address the key questions on how planets form and evolve and how frequent rocky planets suitable for the development of life have formed in our milky way.