The next major space mission for European institutions and space agencies will be a telescope that searches for rocky planets similar to Earth outside our solar system. Named Dishalso Transit of planets and oscillations of stars, It is being built to find nearby, potentially habitable worlds around Sun-like stars that we can examine in detail once it launches in 2026..
The space telescope will be launched into orbit on a new European rocket. Ariane-6Which made its first flight last week after being developed at a cost of 4 billion euros.
“Plato’s goal is to search for exoplanets orbiting stars similar to the Sun and with orbital periods long enough to be in the habitable zone,” explained Dr David Brown of the University of Warwick.
They point out from the Royal Astronomical Society that one of the main goals of the mission is to find another equivalent pair of Earth and Sun, but noIt is also designed to characterize the exoplanets it finds with precision and accuracy (i.e., calculate their masses, radii, and apparent densities).
Ariane 6’s maiden flight
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However, they made it clear that Plato is not just an exoplanet hunter. It is also a stellar science mission. In addition to searching for exoplanets, it will study stars using a number of techniques, including astroseismology (measuring the vibrations and oscillations of stars) to determine their masses, radii and ages.
Unlike most space telescopes, Plato has multiple cameras, one of which bears the British name Arthur EddingtonNamed in honour of the famous astronomer and physicist who was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1924. It contains 24 “normal” cameras (N-CAM) and two “fast” cameras (F-CAM). The N-CAM cameras are arranged in four groups of six, with the cameras in each group pointing in the same direction but the groups are slightly apart.
“This provides Plato with a very wide field of view, improved science performance, fail-over repeatability, and a built-in method for identifying ‘false positive’ signals that could simulate an exoplanet transit,” Dr. Brown explained.
“The planned observation strategy is to monitor two areas of the sky, one in the north and one in the south, for two years each,” he added, adding that “the south has already been selected, while the north has not.” It will be confirmed in a few years.
Several spacecraft components have completed their manufacturing programs and are nearing the end of their calibration tests. These include the front-end electronics (FEE) for the N-CAM cameras, which are being supplied by the UK.
Built by the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, they operate the cameras, digitise the images and transmit them to data processing on board. Ten of the final cameras have been built and tested, and the first was mounted on the optical bench – the surface that keeps all the cameras pointed in the right direction – earlier this year.
Science Editing
*With information from the Royal Astronomical Society
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