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PLATO Spacecraft, Hunter Of Habitable Planets, Now Ready
The ESA's Plato (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) spacecraft has been completed, and is undergoing final testing.
By fitting its sunshield and solar panels, engineers recently completed the construction of Plato, the European Space Agency’s mission to discover Earth-like exoplanets.In space, special mechanisms will automatically release the panels from their folded position. For this test, the array was released manually by an engineer. The opening of the left and right wings was executed separately. Their deployment went as expected...
“With this operation, we have completed the Plato spacecraft. The combined sunshield and solar array module was the last remaining essential part,” comments Thomas Walloschek, ESA’s Plato Project Manager.
“Plato has a distinctive design, conceived to efficiently integrate its advanced cameras within the spacecraft. Its overall layout is optimised to monitor more than 150 000 bright stars at the same time, with high precision. This will enable scientists to hunt for terrestrial planets orbiting stars similar to our Sun.”
To spot exoplanets, Plato carries 26 advanced cameras tasked with capturing the tiniest variations in the intensity of a star’s light. To achieve the necessary high sensitivity, the cameras must be kept cool, so that each camera is kept at its best-focus temperature around -80° C.
Protected from sunlight by the sunshield and facing deep space, Plato’s scientific instruments will cool down and stay at the required frigid temperature throughout the mission’s lifetime.
Once in orbit, the solar array will catch light from the Sun to power the spacecraft electronics. The sunshield will keep the scientific equipment in shadow, protecting it from the Sun’s glare.
(Via esa.)
Golden Age great EE 'Doc" Smith described a manual search for habitable planets in his 1934 novel Skylark of Valeron, but it's just too slow for science fiction fans.
Science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton nailed down the automated solution eighty years ago in his exciting 1936 short story Cosmic Quest:
I was near enough it now to set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching it for a habitable planet.These instruments were the wonderful ones our astronomers had perfected. With super-telescopic eyes each one scanned a part of the star field before them. And each mechanical eye, when it found planetary systems in its field, automatically shifted upon them a higher powered telespectroscope which recorded on permanent film the size, mean temperature and atmospheric conditions of these worlds.
(Read more about Hamilton's search for habitable planets)
(The telespectroscope recorded the conditions of these other worlds)
It's amazing that, a century after the essential insights and ideas were published to the world in science fiction magazines, the reality unfolds before us!
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/11/2025)
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