PLATO Mission

Kurzfassung

The main goals of the PLATO mission are the detection and characterization of terrestrial planets around solar-type stars as well as at the study of their host star properties. The key performance of PLATO is to detect terrestrial planets orbiting in the habitable zone of these stars. This science goal drives the design and the operations of the mission. The PLATO Payload features a complex multi-telescope configuration consisting of 26 cameras of 12 cm pupil size covering a field of view of more than 2 200 square degrees, spread over 104 CCDs of 20 million pixels each. The information of the cameras has to be combined in order to achieve the strict noise requirements at mission level. The project is preparing now the mission critical design review. In this talk we will present the current status of the mission and review the expected science performance for the project, resulting in the key scientific results that can be achieved by the mission.