COROT mission update

[rsa_4]

Nice article from the BBC on the progress for the COROT launch:<br /><font color="yellow"><br />Planet-detector nears its launch <br />By Rebecca Morelle <br />Science reporter, BBC News <br /><br /><br /><br />The hunt for Earth-like planets is to be stepped-up as a new mission prepares for launch. <br />Corot will be the first spacecraft capable of detecting rocky planets just a few times bigger than Earth that are orbiting neighbouring stars. <br /><br />It will also uncover information on the stars themselves, determining their mass, age and chemical composition. <br /><br />The multinational mission, led by the French space agency Cnes, is due to launch on the 26 or 27 December. <br /><br />Thien Lam Trong, Corot Project Manager from Cnes, said: "Man has been thinking about other worlds since the beginning of astronomy. Corot will help us to understand whether Earth-like exoplanets are a reality or dream." <br /><br /><br />The 650kg (1,400lb) satellite will be launched on the Soyuz-2-1b vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, into a polar orbit 827km (514 miles) above the Earth. <br /><br />Corot carries a 27cm (11in) telescope and a four-charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera, sensitive to tiny changes in the brightness of stars. <br /><br />"There are two main science objectives for this mission," said Ian Roxburgh, professor of astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London, who is the European Space Agency (Esa) scientist on Corot. Esa is a partner on Corot along with Austria, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Brazil. <br /><br />And one of these, he said, would be to monitor about 60,000 stars to find some of the planets orbiting them. <br /><br />"As a planet comes inbetween us, the observer, and the star, it goes across the front of the star and blocks out some of the light - this is called a transit, like the transit of Venus. <br /><br />"So we will be measuring the light from the stars, looking for decreases in brightness to detect if a planet is in orbit." <br /><br /><br />Over a</font>

 

[galactichalo]

Good news for those Euro people<br /><br /><br />What happened NASA's TPF did it get funding yet ?

 

[christine16]

yah it would be interesting to know