PLATO

Twenty-six 12 cm refractive cameras on one platform (24 at 25 s cadencecadenceThe interval between successive measurements of the same field or target. Sets which variability timescales a time series can resolve: TESS reaches 20 s, Rubin revisits each field every few nights., two fast cameras at 2.5 s), overlapping to view more than 2,100 deg²square degreeUnit of solid angle: one degree by one degree on the sky. The whole sky is about 41,253 deg²; the full Moon covers about 0.2 deg². with very high photometricphotometryMeasuring the flux of a source in a passband. Aperture photometry sums pixels inside a region; PSF photometry fits the point-spread function; forced photometry measures at a position fixed in advance, whether or not a source is detected there. precision on bright stars. Long, uninterrupted light curveslight curveFlux of one source as a function of time. The basic product of transit searches, variable-star work and transient follow-up. of hundreds of thousands of F–K dwarfs target Earth-size planets in year-long orbits, with stellar masses, radii and ages from asteroseismologyasteroseismologyInferring a star's interior, mass, radius and age from the frequencies of its oscillation modes, seen as ppm-level brightness variations in long, uninterrupted light curves.. An ESA M-class mission.

Operator

ESA

Orbit

Sun–Earth L2

Aperture

26 × 12 cm cameras

Passband

500 nm – 1000 nm

Launch

April 2027 (target)