PLATO, PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars Options

[Marz]

I saw this brief ESA blurb about a potential successor to the Kepler mission:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMSHM7CS5G_index_0.html

It is under review along with Euclid and the Solar orbiter, but only 2 of these 3 missions will have funding to move forward. According the the website:
"The final decision about which missions to implement will be taken after the definition activities are completed, which is foreseen to be in mid-2011."

I found news on ESA's website that makes it appear that PLATO did not make the cut.
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=49385 ://http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/ob...objectid=49385

This is surprising to me considering that TESS was not selected by NASA, so it appears there are no follow up telescopes planet to expand upon Kepler's success, which is restricted to such a small survey site. I wonder if there might be another way to fund PLATO? The only other information I've gleaned so far is this website:
http://www.lesia.obspm.fr/perso/claude-catala/plato_web.html

Are these missions getting bumped in part due to the need to have JWST perform follow up studies? It'd be nice to see space telescopes getting fast-tracked instead of sidelined, and something else needs to replace Kepler in another 8 years.

[bobik]

PLATO Optical Bench (OB) and Service Module (SVM) flight model (FM) mechanical structures were delivered for further integration work to Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich and Cannes, respectively.

[StargazeInWonder]

This is not very timely, but this analysis of the PLATO mission estimates a yield of very roughly 15 candidate earthlike planets.

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html...aa41640-21.html

What makes this a bit more interesting than when it was first published is that the characterization of candidate earthlike planets that transit M dwarf hosts has proven more difficult than hoped. The JWST itself has proven more capable than expected in a technical sense, but the universe is not cooperating very nicely: Even the dimmest red dwarfs seem to be noisier than expected, and the planets checked have so far have shown little in the way of [measurable] atmospheres. So, with that path of inquiry proving harder, there's a comparative increase in what we might hope for from candidate earthlike planets that orbit FGK dwarfs like the Sun.

Those will be tough to characterize, too. Trying to observe transits of planets that take about a year to orbit their star will mean few opportunities for reasons that we can't control. If the telescopes doing such observation happen to be experiencing local daytime when the transits occur, that further reduces the opportunities, and with the ELT and GMT expected to be at the same longitude, we may have no backup options. Nonetheless, it's nice to know that PLATO will at least identify some of the best candidates for characterization, however long it may take for that work to succeed.