PLATO DPS: State of the art on-board data processing for Europe's next planet-hunter

State-of-the-art optical space instruments are capable of producing data rates that considerably exceed the available down-link capacities. The potential data rates are increasing as the sensor technologies progress. These trends require a signifi-cant data reduction on-board, most appropriately at the source of the data, the in-strument. Furthermore, the high availability needed to fulfill the science goals re-quire a high degree of autonomy. In this presentation we will discuss these trends using the example of the architecture of the data processing system of the PLATO payload. PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is the third medium (M3) mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme. The goal of the PLATO mission is to detect terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone of so-lar-type stars and characterize their bulk properties. The PLATO instrument is comprised of 24 identical refracting telescopes each equipped with 4 CCDs, plus 2 additional telescopes which aid the space-craft fine-pointing. Altogether the PLATO payload is comprised of over 27 CPU cores, over 30 FPGAs and 6 Space-Wire Routers. In order to master this complex system of interacting soft-ware and hardware we use standardized protocols, pre-qualified operating sys-tems, Model-Based Systems-Engineering tools and techniques, code-generation, and on-board control procedures. We will give an overview of the aforemen-tioned tools and techniques, discuss their benefits and pitfalls and share the les-sons learnt so far in the development of the PLATO instrument. Finally, we will propose architectural considerations that could potentially improve the perfor-mance of similar instrument designs in the future.