An industrialized and deterministic approach for aligning and focusing the 26 PLATO refractive telescopes, designed for operating in space

Leonardo SpA is leading an Italian Space Industry Team, funded by ASI, collaborating to the ESA mission PLATO program for the development of the 26 telescopes, that will fly on a single platform, aimed to discover, observe and analyze the exoplanets. The mission is based on a challenging telescope design with peculiar optical performance to be assured at very low operative temperature. The "large" number of telescopes is quite unusual for the production of scientific payload; therefore, it has imposed a change with respect the prototypical manufacturing and test approach as standard for a few Flight Models, addressing the implementation of smart and fast methodologies for the aligning and focusing of the telescopes based on simulation of the as-built data. The paper describes that approach.