ESA's PLATO mission aims the detection and characterization of terrestrial planets around solar-type stars as well as the study of host star properties. The noise-to-signal ratio (NSR) is the main performance parameter of the PLATO instrument, which consists of 24 Normal Cameras and 2 Fast Cameras. In order to justify, verify and breakdown NSR-relevant requirements the software simulator PINE was developed. PINE models the signal pathway from a target star to the digital output of a camera based on physical models and considers the major noise contributors. In this paper, the simulator's coarse mode is introduced which allows fast performance analyses on instrument level. The added value of PINE is illustrated by exemplary applications.
@article{arxiv.2406.11556,
title = {PLATO's signal and noise budget},
author = {Anko Börner and Carsten Paproth and Juan Cabrera and Martin Pertenais and Heike Rauer and J. Miguel Mas-Hesse and Isabella Pagano and Jose Lorenzo Alvarez and Anders Erikson and Denis Grießbach and Yves Levillain and Demetrio Magrin and Valery Mogulsky and Sami-Matias Niemi and Thibaut Prod'homme and Sara Regibo and Joris De Ridder and Steve Rockstein and Reza Samadi and Dimitri Serrano-Velarde and Alan Smith and Peter Verhoeve and Dave Walton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.11556},
year = {2024}
}