Announcement of Opportunity
for a Community Scientist in the PLATO mission

12 October 2022

The purpose of this Announcement of Opportunity (AO) is to solicit proposals for a Community Scientist in the PLATO mission. This AO is open to scientists affiliated with institutes located in ESA Member States. Scientists involved in the PLATO Mission Consortium management (programmatic, scientific, or technical) or who are responsible for hardware or software development and procurement activities are not eligible to apply.

PLATO aims at finding and studying a large number of extrasolar planetary systems, with emphasis on the properties of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone around solar-like stars. The mission objectives also include the investigation of seismic activity in stars, enabling precise characterisation of a planet's host star, including its age. In addition, PLATO will address a large number of complementary science topics in various areas of astronomy.

Community Scientists

Through this AO ESA will appoint one Community Scientists who will join the PLATO Science Working Team. One Community Scientist has been appointed following an earlier AO. The main responsibility of the Community Scientists is to advise ESA on the means to optimise the use of PLATO data by the general scientific community. This includes looking after the interests of the scientific community involved in the PLATO complementary science programmes. In addition, the Community Scientists will be expected to provide support to the communications activities of ESA.

The successful candidate will be appointed, ad personam, by the ESA Director of Science for an initial term of three years, which may be renewed.

Proposal Documentation

An invitation from the ESA Director of Science to respond to this Announcement of Opportunity can be found in the right-hand menu.

Full details of the appointment requirements and conditions, the contents and formats of the applicant's proposal, and the evaluation criteria are given in the Announcement of Opportunity document, available to download from the right-hand menu. Additional important information can be found in the PLATO Science Management Plan and the Definition Study Report, both of which are available to download from the right-hand menu.

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Proposal Submission

Proposals, in PDF format, must be submitted using the proposal submission form linked below, before the deadline of 30 November 2022, 12:00 (noon) CET.

Schedule

The schedule for this AO is given in the table below:

Contact

Last updated: 6 July 2023

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