ESA's PLATO space mission (Rauer et al. 2025) is in the final assembly stage before its launch, foreseen in December 2026. While its Core Science program concerns the detection and characterization of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars, PLATO also offers an open time program called PLATO-CS (PLATO Complementary Science), which may cover any topic in astrophysics. Current simulations with PLATOSim (Jannsen et al. 2024) show that a multitude of science cases in time-domain astronomy can be tackled by the mission, from planets to supermassive black holes.
The worldwide community is invited to become a PLATO Guest Observer (GO) by applying for open time, which will cover up to 8% of the overall telemetry of the mission. This 2-day hands-on workshop aims to help the community in getting ready to prepare and apply for competitive open PLATO GO time, by answering ESA's call for proposals in spring 2026 (9 months before launch).
After a general description of the mission and a demonstration of the GO call by an ESA representative, participants will learn how to use PLATO's instruments, its end-to-end simulator, or existing mock simulations, in order to evaluate the feasibility of their science plans. They will be guided to prepare their proposals by key figures in the PLATO-CS leadership, including 2025 Biermann lecturer Conny Aerts, with the aim to maximize the breath and appeal of the PLATO GO program.
