On a recent blazingly hot and humid morning on the French Riviera, three industrial program managers for the European Space Agency’s next big planet hunting satellite sat down with me to discuss their ambitious PLATO mission. That is, before giving me an inside look at part of the spacecraft in Thales Alenia Space’s adjacent clean room here on the outskirts of Cannes.
PLATO, due for launch atop an Ariane 6 launcher in December 2026, has been a revelatory experience, offering state of the art lessons in 21ST century multinational team building that span both cultures and technologies. PLATO has not only been enabled by lots of creative thinking on the part of academia, but also from an extremely multinational industrial consortium.
We are talking about more than 50 different companies supporting the development of PLATO in 28 different countries across Europe, Pablo Jorba, Plato program manager for OHB, told me in Cannes.
The mission is the result of a collegial effort that relies on cross communication at the highest levels, say the program managers. And one key to the mission has been cooperation between ESA, the PLATO consortium, and the core industry team.
What Makes The Mission Unique?
The roughly 700-million-euro PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations) mission will house the largest combined digital camera ever flown in space, says ESA. And it will receive light from four groups of six cameras all mounted on the same optical satellite platform, while two small telescopes at the top of the platform will be used for fine guidance and pointing. PLATO’s ultimate field of view will be something like 10,000 times the size of a full moon as seen from earth.
Germany’s OHB System AG is PLATO’s prime contractor, with the spacecraft being built and assembled by OHB together with Thales Alenia Space (France and the UK) and Beyond Gravity in Switzerland.
Once at the sun-earth Lagrange Point 2 —- 1.5 million km beyond earth in the direction away from the sun, the spacecraft will begin its four-year nominal science mission.
From there, it will look for extrasolar earthlike planets circling bright sunlike stars using the transit method. That is, by looking for a periodic, tiny dimming caused by a planet passing in front of the parent star. In the process, the spacecraft will acquire images every 25 seconds, for at least two years per target star, observing more than 200,000 stars.
Using asteroseismology, or study of a given star’s internal structure based on the way it oscillates, PLATO will also observe the characteristics and makeup of all the stars in its field of view.
We will have a super wide-angle field of view which is completely new when compared to all our other missions thus far, Thomas Walloschek, Plato program manager for ESA, told me in Cannes. We must avoid the sun directly hitting our cameras, because this would destroy them, he says. So, the sun shield always must face toward the sun, which is why we will need to rotate the spacecraft four times a year, says Walloschek.
In the process, PLATO will assemble the first catalogue of confirmed and characterized planets with known densities, compositions, and ages, which will include planets in the habitable zone of sunlike stars, says ESA.
PLATO can find earthlike planets circling each of these individual stars without ever refocusing or ever retargeting the spacecraft, says Walloschek. We know that it probably takes a year for an earthlike planet to travel around the star, he says. So, as a confirmation, we want to observe at least two transits in front of the star to be sure that we have really detected the planet and nothing, says Walloschek.
Meeting Milestones
Our technical teams work hand in hand, having weekly meetings, and having different workshops at all levels and have our full trust, Catherine Vogel, PLATO program manager for Thales Alenia Space, told me in Cannes. So, they can manage the technical aspects without being bothered too much by the contractual programmatics that we manage at our level, she says. As a result, the mission has managed to meet all the milestones, with margin to spare, says Vogel.
The Bottom Line?
We are all here because we like the challenges posed by breakthrough technologies, says Jorba.
