Abstract
PLATO 2.0 is a mission candidate for ESA's M3 launch opportunity (2022/24).
It addresses fundamental questions such as: How do planetary systems form and
evolve? Are there other systems with planets like ours, able to develop life?
The PLATO 2.0 instrument consists of 34 small aperture telescopes providing a
wide field-of-view and a large photometric magnitude range. It targets bright
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
stars <=11mag 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 foreseen 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 Earth-like 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. ...
Users
Please
log in to take part in the discussion (add own reviews or comments).