The PLATO 2.0 mission

By H. Rauer, C. Català, C. Aerts, T. Appourchaux, W. Benz, A. Brandeker, J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, M. Deleuil, Laurent Gizon, M. Goupil and 150 more. 2013

952 citations recorded by the source corpus.

PLATO 2.0 has recently been selected for ESA’s M3 launch opportunity (2022/24). Providing accurate key planet parameters (radius, mass, density and age) in statistical numbers, it addresses fundamental questions such as: How do planetary systems form and evolve? Are there other systems with planets like ours, including potentially habitable planets? The PLATO 2.0 instrument consists of 34 small aperture telescopes (32 with 25 s readout cadence and 2 with 2.5 s candence) providing a wide field-of-view (2232 deg 2) and a large photometric magnitude range (4–16 mag). It focusses on bright (4–11 mag) stars in wide fields to detect and characterize planets down to Earth-size by photometric transits, whose masses can then be determined by ground-based radial-velocity follow-up measurements. Asteroseismology will be performed for these bright stars to obtain highly accurate stellar parameters, including masses and ages. The combination of bright targets and asteroseismology results in high accuracy for the bulk planet parameters: 2 %, 4–10 % and 10 % for planet radii, masses and ages, respectively. The planned baseline observing strategy includes two long pointings (2–3 years) to detect and bulk characterize planets reaching into the habitable zone (HZ) of solar-like stars and an additional step-and-stare phase to cover in total about 50 % of the sky. PLATO 2.0 will observe up to 1,000,000 stars and detect and characterize hundreds of small planets, and thousands of planets in the Neptune to gas giant regime out to the HZ. It will therefore provide the first large-scale catalogue of bulk characterized planets with accurate radii, masses, mean densities and ages. This catalogue will include terrestrial planets at intermediate orbital distances, where surface temperatures are moderate. Coverage of this parameter range with statistical numbers of bulk characterized planets is unique to PLATO 2.0. The PLATO 2.0 catalogue allows us to e.g.: - complete our knowledge of planet diversity for low-mass objects, - correlate the planet mean density-orbital distance distribution with predictions from planet formation theories,- constrain the influence of planet migration and scattering on the architecture of multiple systems, and - specify how planet and system parameters change with host star characteristics, such as type, metallicity and age. The catalogue will allow us to study planets and planetary systems at different evolutionary phases. It will further provide a census for small, low-mass planets. This will serve to identify objects which retained their primordial hydrogen atmosphere and in general the typical characteristics of planets in such low-mass, low-density range. Planets detected by PLATO 2.0 will orbit bright stars and many of them will be targets for future atmosphere spectroscopy exploring their atmosphere. Furthermore, the mission has the potential to detect exomoons, planetary rings, binary and Trojan planets. The planetary science possible with PLATO 2.0 is complemented by its impact on stellar and galactic science via asteroseismology as well as light curves of all kinds of variable stars, together with observations of stellar clusters of different ages. This will allow us to improve stellar models and study stellar activity. A large number of well-known ages from red giant stars will probe the structure and evolution of our Galaxy. Asteroseismic ages of bright stars for different phases of stellar evolution allow calibrating stellar age-rotation relationships. Together with the results of ESA’s Gaia mission, the results of PLATO 2.0 will provide a huge legacy to planetary, stellar and galactic science.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Charbonneau
2. D. Huber
3. J. Winn
4. J. Johnson
5. I. Minchev
6. J. Southworth
7. Timothy Morton
8. M. Perryman

In Instrumentation

1. D. Charbonneau
2. D. Huber
3. I. Minchev
4. J. Southworth
5. J. Winn
6. Hans-Walter Rix
7. M. Perryman
8. C. Dressing

Citations in the corpus

• Yule-Simpson’s paradox in Galactic Archaeology (2019, background): “…spectroscopy (e.g., APOGEE - Majewski et al. 2017, WEAVE - Dalton et al. 2012, 4MOST - de Jong et al. 2012) δ[Mg/Fe] = 0.05 dex and asteroseismic ages (e.g., CoRoT, K2 - Howell et al. 2014, TESS - Ricker et al. 2015 and PLATO - Rauer et al. 2014) δage = 20%, drawn from a Gaussian distribution.”
• Compositional Imprints in Density–Distance–Time: A Rocky Composition for Close-in Low-mass Exoplanets from the Location of the Valley of Evaporation (2017, methodology): “9) shows that the distribution of the known exoplanets also has a similar V-shape as the synthetic population.”
• The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems (2014, background): “Further out, in the mid-to-late 2020s, the European PLATO mission intends to begin longer-duration transit survey over half of the celestial sphere (Rauer et al. 2013).”
• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Time-dependent Convection, Energy Conservation, Automatic Differentiation, and Infrastructure (2022, background): “Within the next decade, the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars mission (PLATO; Rauer et al. 2014) will search for planetary transits across up to one million stars, characterize rocky extrasolar planets around yellow dwarf stars, subgiant stars, and red dwarf stars (Montalto et al. 2021),…”
• State of the Field: Extreme Precision Radial Velocities (2016, background): “…Survey Satellite (TESS; Ricker et al. 2014), the CHaracterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS; Fortier et al. 2014) and PLAnetary Transits and Oscillation of stars (PLATO; Rauer et al. 2014) will have the precision to detect transiting planets with small radii and will observe bright nearby stars.”
• One of the closest exoplanet pairs to the 3:2 mean motion resonance: K2-19b and c (2015, background): “The upcoming space mission PLATO (Rauer et al. 2014) will provide accurate enough stellar age constraints to potentially detect a decreasing trend in stable multi-planet systems with time due to Lagrange instability (Veras et al. 2015).”