PLATO will detect Earth-like planets


  1. ✦ Small size planets orbiting solar-type stars with about 1 year period.


The exo-planets discovered by PLATO can be fully characterized


  1. ✦ The same data that PLATO acquires for the planet search, are used to derive the internal structure of the hosting stars (by means of asteroseismology techniques). This is mandatory to:


  1. ★Precisely measure properties of exoplanets: mass, radius, age

  2. ★Comparatively study planetary systems of different ages

  3. ★Observe exo-planets in different stages of dynamical evolution and in different stages of physicochemical evolution

  4. ★Correlate the planet and hosting star evolution.


  1. ✦ PLATO will search planets orbiting bright stars. After the planet detection, it will therefore possible to follow up the exo-planetary system with ground based and space telescopes (e.g., ELT, JWST, etc. ) in order to obtain a complete characterization of the planet, its atmosphere, and the whole planetary system.

 

More than 330 extrasolar planets have been discovered since 1995. New discoveries are every week announced. The detection techniques used up to date have biased our results toward Jupiter-mass planets in orbits very close to the star. More recently, a number of planets of smaller mass (Neptunian-like till super-Earths) has been detected orbiting low mass stars. Thanks to the high stability of their photometric measures, the space missions can easily detect transits of small planets in front of their hosting star. The only space mission of this kind in orbit at the moment is CoRoT (more on CoRoT in French,  Italian, German, Spanish). 

The Main Science Objective and the PLATO Performances according to the payload studies are given in this page.

PLATO can reach a coverage up to 42% of the sky with the required observing strategy of:


  1. ✴ Two main fields observed sequentially for 3 years/each


  1. ✴ A number of Step&Stare phases with duration between 2 and 5 months






















Thanks to the large surveyed area, the number of Bright Stars investigated by PLATO is huge with respect to previous missions. In the picure below see the comparison with Kepler, obtained taking into account the observations of the main fields only (the two orange regions in the picture above).