Design of the electrical ground support equipment for the PLATO camera AIV

PLATO is an ESA mission to hunt for Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of their host star. The heart of the payload consists of 26 wide-field cameras. We develop a Common Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) framework for the testing and verification of these cameras. The focal planes are aligned to the telescope optics at ambient temperature and the performance verification is done at operational temperature in thermal-vacuum conditions in different facilities. The Common-EGSE system will guarantee that tests are executed via the same procedures and are analyzed identically, by providing a software framework that can be tuned for site-specific hardware and avoids duplicate developments. The Common EGSE provides commanding for the camera and the Ground Support Equipment (GSE), telemetry monitoring, logging, data storage, and data analysis. In addition, the design allows for sharing commanding and analysis scripts. We present the design of the system and the generic commanding scheme for test setup hardware.