Europe’s COROT Satellite
The Convection Rotational planetary Transits (COROT), a small European satellite, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in December 2006, embarking on a mission designed to find the first rocky planets outside our own solar system. The instrument was carried into orbit by the Soyuz 2-1b rocket, the first time this version of the workhorse Soyuz rocket has been used.
The satellite will follow an exact polar orbit at an altitude of about 557 miles from which the satellite’s 10.6 inch telescope will view more than 120,000 Milky Way stars similar to our own Sun. Seismic waves moving over the surface of the star will be measured as a possible way of discovering more about their internal processes. Vibrations detected might enable astronomers to gauge the age, mass and chemistry of the star, with about one hundred stars to be studied in this way. The instrument will also be able to perceive variations in the brightness of certain stars, often an indication of planets passing before the star.
In 1995 the first planet outside our solar system was found, and since that time more than 200 others have been discovered, all of which were gas giants similar to Jupiter and which were orbiting closely around their stars. Most of these exoplanets were discovered using ground-based telescopes and it’s expected that COROT will be much more effective at finding planets since it will not be viewing through the atmosphere of the Earth.
During the satellite’s two-and-a-half year mission it is expected that several dozen rocky planets several times larger than the Earth will be discovered along with many more of the gas giants. Malcolm Fridlund, ESA’s project scientist for COROT said, “COROT could detect so many planets of this new type, together with the old type, that astronomers will be able to make statistical studies of them.”
The mission is to be divided into phases of six months when the spacecraft will point toward the center of the galaxy or away from the center, with each phase having two observing runs of 150 and 20 days. The longer periods are best for finding rocky planets similar to Earth, and the shorter periods are more favorable for seeing gas giants.
Led by the French national space agency CNES, the mission partners include the European Space Agency as well as scientists from Germany, Spain, Belgium, Austria, and Brazil. NASA’s Kepler probe will join COROT in 2008 and, with its 37.4 inch telescope, could locate rocky planets even smaller than Earth, and as many as 50 Earth-sized planets might be found in its four year mission
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 10:49 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
