INTA as test house for PLATO: telescopes TVAC testing and calibration set-up preparation and EM results

Kurzfassung

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillation of Starts) is the third medium class mission of ESA devoted to exoplanets detection and partial characterization together to the associated star activity evaluation through its astroseismology. It is consisting on 26 telescopes mounted on the same platform, 24 called ‘normal’ and composed of four full-frame CCDs and 2 ‘fast’ composed of four frame-transfer CCDs mounted on their respective focal plane assemblies (FPAs). For completing the detection chain, they are using their front-end electronics (FEE), being the optics and opto-mechanics of the telescope optical unit (TOU) the last element of the PLATO-CAMs. In the framework of the mission development, the PLATO-CAMs, after their proper alignment and assembly, are required to be calibrated and tested on simulated working conditions. INTA is one of the European institutions (together to IAS and SRON, in France and Netherlands, respectively), in which such telescopes testing and calibration is carried out by simulating the L2 conditions corresponding to the PLATO-CAMs working environment. In this paper, the setup preparation for PLATO-CAM calibration and testing details are reported on, including design, and fabrication of the different elements, all the ground support equipment (GSE) required for the PLATO-CAMs full characterization and performance evaluation. In addition, the results on the first model tested at INTA, the engineering model (EM) are summarized.