PLATO: the status of the Instrument Control Unit following the Critical Design Review

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is the third medium-class mission (M3), selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2014 and adopted in 2017 for the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 scientific program. The launch is scheduled in 2026 from the French Guiana (Kourou) for a nominal in-orbit lifetime of 4 years plus up to 4 years of possible extension. The main purpose of the mission is the discovery and preliminary characterization of many different types of exoplanets down to rocky terrestrial planets orbiting around bright solar-type stars. The PLATO spacecraft will operate from a halo orbit around L2 (the Sun-Earth 2nd Lagrangian Point), a virtual point in space, 1.5 million km beyond Earth as seen from the Sun and its Payload will consist of 26 small telescopes (24 normal and 2 fast), pointing at the same target stars, that provide images every 25 seconds with the normal camera and every 2.5 seconds for the two fast cameras, operating in a close loop with the AOCS (S/C Attitude and Orbit Control System). Each camera (consisting of a telescope, the Focal Plane Assembly and its Front-End Electronics) will host four CCDs producing 20.3 megapixels images adding up to 81.4 megapixels per normal camera and 2.11 gigapixels for the overall Payload (P/L). This huge amount of data cannot be transmitted to the ground and need to be processed on-board by the P/L Data Processing System (DPS) made up of various processing electronic units. The DPS of the PLATO instrument comprises the Normal and Fast DPUs (Data Processing Units) and a single ICU (Instrument Control Unit), in charge of HW and SW lossless data compression and managing the P/L through a SpaceWire (SpW) network. In this paper we will review the status of the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) after its Critical Design Review (CDR) process, performed by ESA and PMC (PLATO Mission Consortium), the results of the performance test preliminary run on the Engineering Model (EM), waiting for the following Engineering and Qualification Model (EQM) and Proto-Flight Model (PFM), and the status of the early models development (Engineering Models 1 and 2, Mass and Thermal Dummy - MTD) that, along with the Boot SW (BSW) burning in PROM readiness, will enable the EQM manufacturing.