Plato’s 24 newly installed cameras

The PLATO satellite being constructed at OHB in Bremen, Germany on 9 April 2025. Engineers at OHB, Germany, inspect Plato’s newly installed 24 cameras on the spacecraft’s optical bench, the structure that keeps all cameras firmly pointed in the right direction. Together the 24 identical, ultra-sensitive eyes will stare at a large area of the sky and hunt for terrestrial planets. Two more so-called ‘fast cameras’, will be installed in the coming months. Plato will use its cameras simultaneously to survey the sky and discover exoplanets that orbit stars similar to our Sun, searching for potentially habitable worlds. The 24 cameras are arranged in four groups of six elements that have the same field-of-view. The lines of sight of the four groups are offset by an angle of 9.2°. With this arrangement, the cameras can survey a very large area of the sky, more than 2000 square-degrees, at once. The 24 identical cameras will make images every 25 seconds, while the two ‘fast’ cameras will make them every 2.5 seconds. Each camera is equipped with four CCD light-sensors for a total of 81.4-megapixel images per camera, resulting in two-billion-pixel images for the overall spacecraft. These will be the largest images ever for a space mission.