Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) have completed assembly of the Plato space telescope. Now the device has to pass a series of tests to confirm its readiness for launch.
Construction of the Plato telescope began in 2022. The space observatory will search for exoplanets using a photometric method by tracking small changes in the brightness of stars caused by transits of planet-like bodies orbiting around them. The “eyes” of the new telescope will be a module consisting of 26 cameras with an aperture of 12 cm, each equipped with four CCD array sensors capable of capturing 20.3-megapixel images. When working together, they will provide a total field of view of 2.11 gigapixels, which will be a record in the history of space missions.
Thanks to its design, Plato will have a much wider field of view than the famous Kepler telescope and will be able to study relatively bright stars. The mission’s goal will be to search for Earth-like planets around 150,000 sun-like stars.
The final assembly operations for Plato took place in September after its delivery to the ESA test center in the Netherlands. Engineers connected the sunshield and solar panels to the spacecraft body, completing its construction. Next, they successfully tested the mechanism for deploying the spacecraft’s solar panels. To simulate weightlessness, they were suspended from a support frame using a system of blocks, and a special lamp played the role of the Sun.
Plato will now undergo a series of tests to verify its ability to survive launch and operate in outer space. They will include vibration, acoustic, and vacuum tests.
Plato will be launched in December 2026 using an Ariane 6 rocket. The spacecraft will be placed at the L2 Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system. The Plato mission is scheduled to last four years, with a further possible extension of four years.
According to ESA
