Contribution of the IAC to the space mission plato 2.0 phases b2 / c

In force date
Call year
2015
Investigator
Hans Jörg
Deeg Deeg
Amount granted to the IAC Consortium
701.800,00 €
Description

This subproject aims to contribute with for scientific and technical work for the IACs contributions to the PLATO 2.0 mission is requested. This includes engineering work during the B2 phase, to be completed in July 2017 with the PDR, and during phase C, to finish in 2018 with the CDR, in addition to acquisitions of LLI (Long Lead Items) during 2018.

Our contributions are of electronic engineering and include

(i) the power supplies of the Main Electronic Units (MEU-PSU), performed within the Spanish PLATO consortium

(ii) the clocking components ('Clock generation' and 'clock distribution modules') for the 'Auxiliary Electronics Units (AEU), together with a Hungarian consortium. The scientific contributions include the coordination of two work packages focused on the preparation of the PLATO mission (circumbinarias planets; software for ground-based photometric follow-up) and contain also tasks related to asteroseismology (one of PLATOs core scientific topics) as well as binary stars investigations.

Follow-up observations of planet-candidates from the Kepler K2-mission are a successful scientific activity that we advance within two leading consortia. This activity, in turn, is essential for being prepared for the observational monitoring during the PLATO mission, as well as for the previous CHEOPS and TESS missions.

An additional objective is the analysis of the CCD aging of the CoRoT mission during its nearly six years of flight, which is an issue that has generated strong interest from the CHEOPS mission, due to their similar orbital characteristics.