The instrument control unit of the ESA-PLATO 2.0 mission
2016
PLATO 2.0 has been selected by ESA as the third medium-class Mission (M3) of the Cosmic Vision Program. Its
Payload is conceived for the discovery of new transiting exoplanets on the disk of their parent stars and for the study of
planetary system formation and evolution as well as to answer fundamental questions concerning the existence of other
planetary systems like our own, including the presence of potentially habitable new worlds.
The PLATO Payload design is based on the adoption of four sets of short focal length telescopes having a large field of
view in order to exploit a large sky coverage and to reach, at the same time, the needed photometry accuracy and signalto-
noise ratio (S/N) within a few tens of seconds of exposure time. The large amount of data produced by the telescope is
collected and processed by means of the Payload’s Data Processing System (DPS) composed by many processing
electronics units.
This paper gives an overview of the PLATO 2.0 DPS, mainly focusing on the architecture and processing capabilities of
its Instrument Control Unit (ICU), the electronic subsystem acting as the main interface between the Payload (P/L) and
the Spacecraft (S/C).
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