.We describe the main tasks of the Product Assurance process for the Telescope Optical Unit (TOU) of the ESA PLATO mission, that starts from the design phase and proceeds through all phases, up to the final product, with the aim of improving the likelihood of success of the mission. When dealing with the opto-mechanical components of the TOU, several aspects regarding safety and performance have to be analyzed and tracked. From the PA point of view, we focus in this paper on materials and processes selection that shall be suitable and robust enough for the space environment. Cleanliness and contamination control is needed to overcome loss of optical performance. Validations and qualifications on prototypes is fundamental to assess the reliability of the instrument for its purpose and for the lifetime of the mission.
KEYWORDS: Stars, Field programmable gate arrays, Data processing, Planets, Cameras, Data communications, Control systems, Electronics, Aerospace engineering
PLATO1 is an M-class mission of the European Space Agency’s Cosmic Vision program, whose launch is foreseen by 2026. PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars aims to characterize exoplanets and exoplanetary systems by detecting planetary transits and conducting asteroseismology of their parent stars. PLATO is the next generation planetary transit space experiment, as it will fly after CoRoT, Kepler, TESS and CHEOPS; its objective is to characterize exoplanets and their host stars in the solar neighbors. While it is built on the heritage from previous missions, the major breakthrough to be achieved by PLATO will come from its strong focus on bright targets, typically with mv≤11. The PLATO targets will also include a large number of very bright and nearby stars, with mv≤8. The prime science goals characterizing and distinguishing PLATO from the previous missions are: the detection and characterization of exoplanetary systems of all kinds, including both the planets and their host stars, reaching down to small, terrestrial planets in the habitable zone; the identification of suitable targets for future, more detailed characterization, including a spectroscopic search for biomarkers in nearby habitable exoplanets (e.g. ARIEL Mission scientific case, E-ELT observations from Ground); a full characterization of the planet host stars, via asteroseismic analysis: this will provide the Community with the masses, radii and ages of the host stars, from which masses, radii and ages of the detected planets will be determined.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.