PLATO: PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars

The PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars Mission (PLATO), presented to ESA in the framework of its “Cosmic Vision” programme, will detect and characterize exoplanets by means of their transit signature in front of a very large sample of bright stars, and measure the seismic oscillations of the parent stars orbited by these planets in order to understand the properties of the exoplanetary systems. PLATO is the next-generation planet finder, building on the accomplishments of CoRoT and Kepler: i) it will observe significantly more stars, ii) its targets will be 2 to 3 magnitudes brighter (hence the precision of the measurements will be correspondingly greater as will be those of post-detection investigations, e.g. spectroscopy, asteroseismology, and eventually imaging), iii) it will be capable of observing significantly smaller exoplanets. The space-based observations will be complemented by ground- and space-based follow-up observations. These goals will be achieved by a long-term (4 years), high-precision, high-time-resolution, high-duty-cycle monitoring in visible photometry of a sample of more than 100,000 relatively bright (mV ≤ 12) stars and another 400,000 down to mV = 14. Two different mission concepts are proposed for PLATO: i) a “staring” concept with 100 small, very wide-field telescopes, assembled on a single platform and all looking at the same 26° diameter field, and ii) a “spinning” concept with three moderate-size telescopes covering more than 1400 degree2.