Plato arrived at ESA’s test centre by boat

The two main parts of the Plato spacecraft were recently joined together at OHB’s cleanroom in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. On 1 September, Plato arrived in the Netherlands by boat from Germany via the Rhine River. The vessel transporting it moored a few km away from ESTEC.

From there, Plato was driven to ESA’s centre by special transport, carefully unloaded, and then moved to a cleanroom.

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What’s next for Plato

In the coming weeks, engineers will mount the remaining essential part of the spacecraft: the combined sunshield and solar arrays module.

With the spacecraft complete, testing will begin. To determine that it can be safely launched, Plato will undergo intense shaking and sound ‘bombardments’ during vibration and acoustic tests.

After these, the spacecraft will be placed into the Large Space Simulator – Europe’s largest vacuum chamber – to verify that it can withstand the extreme temperatures and emptiness of space and work well.

Plato is scheduled to launch on an Ariane 6 rocket in December 2026 on its quest to search for Earth-like planets orbiting stars similar to our Sun.

For this, the spacecraft is equipped with 26 ultrasensitive cameras designed to capture the tiniest variations in the intensity of a star’s light. When planets pass in front of their host stars, they dim the starlight we receive. By capturing and analysing this dimming effect, Plato can spot new exoplanets.

The mission’s focus is to discover planets that circle Sun-like stars in the habitable zone – the ‘goldilocks’ region, where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface. These planets take several months to complete an orbit because of their location: not too close, not too far from their star. To capture them, Plato’s 26 eyes will stare at the same region of the sky continuously for a minimum of two years.

This will also enable Plato to study ‘starquakes’, encoded in subtle changes of a star’s brightness and provide scientists with unique insights into the interiors and ages of stars.

Like other groundbreaking missions such as Webb and Euclid, Plato will peer into space vastness from an orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), 1.5 million kilometres away.

From this vantage point, the mission will inspect more than 200 000 stars over its nominal lifetime and reveal whether the environment we enjoy on Earth can exist also elsewhere in our galaxy.

About Plato

ESA’s Plato (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) will use 26 cameras to study terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone of Sun-like stars.  

Plato’s scientific instrumentation, consisting of the cameras and electronic units, is provided through a collaboration between ESA and the Plato Mission Consortium. This Consortium is composed of various European research centres, institutes and industries, led by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The spacecraft is being built and assembled by the industrial Plato Core Team led by OHB together with Thales Alenia Space and Beyond Gravity. 

Find out more about Plato

Find out more about Ariane 6

Contact:
ESA Media Relations
media@esa.int