"The PLATO Mission: Science Data and Open Time Proposals"

Abstract:

PLATO is the ESA's M3 mission optimized for the identification and characterization of Earth-like planets orbiting within the habitable zone of Sun-like stars, i.e., true Earth analogues. The mission development has already been completed and after finishing the late tests at ESTEC it should be shipped after the Summer to Kourou, for a launch planned for January 2027.
In this talk I will summarize the performance of PLATO, the kind of data it will provide and the characteristics of the different data releases. A call for open time proposals during the first 2 years of operations was released last April 7th, and will remain open until May 21st. I will present how to prepare proposals for open time, the capabilities and limitations, and will provide some guidelines about the Proposal Handling tools at ESA.