Delivery of the Flight Model of the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) of PLATO

The delivery process of the flight model of the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) of the PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) was successfully completed at the beginning of December 2024. The unit, built by Kaiser Italia, was shipped to the prime contractor OHB München (Satellite Prime Integrator) after authorization by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Designed and built by a team that includes INAF institutes and industrial partners, who have contributed significantly to the success of the ICU, it is worth highlighting the participation of the Fundación Galileo Galilei, the Catania Astrophysical Observatory, the Florence Astronomical Observatory and the IAPS of Rome.

The instrument control unit is a fundamental component of the mission's data processing system (DPS), and was designed to be the beating heart of the integration between the PLATO Service Module and the mission's payload subsystems, which include the Main Electronics Unit, the Front-End Electronics and the Auxiliary Electronics Unit. Thanks to the SpaceWire network, and to the powerful hardware, the ICU guarantees a continuous and secure data flow between the various subsystems.

The device includes, in addition to the hardware, the boot software and the FPGA firmware developed by Kayser Italia Srl, as well as the Router and Data Compression Unit developed by the Institute of Applied Physics in Graz Austria. The ICU application software was written and validated by the INAF-IAPS (Institute of Space Astrophysics and Planetology) team, which supervised the development and testing.

The ICU scientific director (Rosario Cosentino - INAF) coordinated the development and integration work of the unit.

The PLATO mission is intended to discover extrasolar planets and study their characteristics, it represents one of the most ambitious missions of ESA. The PLATO DPS system, of which the ICU is a central part, is responsible for the acquisition, processing and transmission of the scientific data collected by the 26 cameras of the mission (24 normal and 2 fast). The ICU, in fact, has the task of collecting, compressing and sending these data to the service module for subsequent analysis and managing communications between all subsystems and the satellite.

The successful delivery of the ICU represents an important step forward for the Italian contribution to the PLATO mission, which plans to revolutionize our understanding of planetary systems and stars, thanks to advanced technology and international cooperation between ASI, ESA and Italian partners.

Flight Model (PFM) of the PLATO ICU