@article{813fd3dfcd694c09ba72aef1b026391e,
title = "The PLATO field selection process: I. Identification and content of the long-pointing fields",
abstract = "PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars is an ESA M-class satellite planned for launch by the end of 2026 and dedicated to the wide-field search of transiting planets around bright and nearby stars, with a strong focus on discovering habitable rocky planets hosted by solar-like stars. The choice of the fields to be pointed at is a crucial task since it has a direct impact on the scientific return of the mission. In this paper, we describe and discuss the formal requirements and the key scientific prioritization criteria that have to be taken into account in the Long-duration Observation Phase (LOP) field selection, and apply a quantitative metric to guide us in this complex optimization process. We identify two provisional LOP fields, one for each hemisphere (LOPS1 and LOPN1), and we discuss their properties and stellar content. While additional fine-tuning shall be applied to LOP selection before the definitive choice, which is set to be made two years before launch, we expect that their position will not move by more than a few degrees with respect to what is proposed in this paper. ",
keywords = "Astronomical databases: miscellaneous, Catalogs, Planetary systems, Planets and satellites: detection, Stars: fundamental parameters, Techniques: photometric",
author = "V. Nascimbeni and G. Piotto and A. B{\"o}rner and M. Montalto and Marrese, {P. M.} and J. Cabrera and S. Marinoni and C. Aerts and G. Altavilla and S. Benatti and R. Claudi and M. Deleuil and S. Desidera and M. Fabrizio and L. Gizon and Goupil, {M. J.} and V. Granata and Heras, {A. M.} and D. Magrin and L. Malavolta and Mas-Hesse, {J. M.} and S. Ortolani and I. Pagano and D. Pollacco and L. Prisinzano and R. Ragazzoni and G. Ramsay and H. Rauer and S. Udry",
note = "Funding Information: Acknowledgements. The authors are grateful to the referee, Keivan Stassun, for reading the manuscript and providing constructive comments and suggestions. This work presents results from the European Space Agency (ESA) space mission PLATO. The PLATO payload, the PLATO Ground Segment and PLATO data processing are joint developments of ESA and the PLATO Mission Consortium (PMC). Funding for the PMC is provided at national levels, in particular by countries participating in the PLATO Multilateral Agreement (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and United Kingdom) and institutions from Brazil. Members of the PLATO Consortium can be found at https://platomission.com/. The ESA PLATO mission website is https: //www.cosmos.esa.int/plato. We thank the teams working for PLATO for all their work. M.M., G.P., V.N., V.G., L.P., S.D., S.O., S.B., R.C., L.M., and I.P. acknowledge support from PLATO ASI-INAF agreements n.2015-019-R0-2015 and n. 2015-019-R.1-2018. We would like to acknowledge the financial support of INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica), Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) under contract to INAF: ASI 2014-049-R.0 dedicated to SSDC. C.A. acknowledges funding received from the KU Leuven Research Council (grant C16/18/005: PARADISE) and from the BELgian federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) through PRODEX grants for Gaia and PLATO. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www. cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Multilateral Agreement. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database (operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France), TOPCAT and STILTS (Taylor 2005, 2006). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} ESO 2022.",
year = "2022",
month = feb,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1051/0004-6361/202142256",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "658",
journal = "Astronomy and Astrophysics",
issn = "0004-6361",
publisher = "EDP Sciences",
}