The European Space Agency’s next-generation planet hunting mission, PLATO, has passed a review and can proceed to its next development phase. PLATO, which stands for Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars, is a mission to watch for the tell-tale signs of exoplanets.

According to an article on phys.org the green light was given last week, verifying the maturity of the spacecraft platform and the payload module, confirming the solidity of the spacecraft-to-payload interfaces, the payload schedule with particular focus on the series production of the 26 cameras, and the robustness of the spacecraft schedule.

If all goes to plan, the Plato mission will launch in 2026 and use an array of 26 cameras to monitor 200,000 relatively bright stars over a large area of the sky, searching for tiny, regular dips in brightness as their planets transit in front of them, temporarily blocking out a small fraction of the starlight. The analysis of these transits and of the variations in the starlight will allow us to characterise the properties of the exoplanets and their host stars.

Like the James Webb Space Telescope, PLATO is destined for Lagrange point 2, where it will perform its four-year mission.

The UK has invested £25 million into the PLATO project and has a major role in the mission. The University of Warwick leads the PLATO Science Management Consortium. Scientists and engineers at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory are responsible for the development of the camera electronics for the telescopes. The detectors are produced by Teledyne e2v in Chelmsford, and a team of UK scientists coordinated by Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy is developing the Exoplanet Analysis data processing system.

The next step for PLATO is the spacecraft critical design review in 2023, which will assess the complete spacecraft prior to assembly.