Search for other worlds to step up with launch of French planet hunter
COROT, due for launch in late 2006, will be the first spacecraft devoted to the search for rocky planets, similar to our own Earth. It will look for the tiny drop in light caused by a planet as it slips across the face of its parent star. COROT is a CNES mission with ESA participation. Credits: CNES/D.Ducros
A 12-year-old quest to find planets orbiting other stars gets a big boost this week with the launch of a French-made spacecraft that may help reveal a home-from-home for our descendants.
Bearing a 30-centimetre (12-inch) telescope and two cameras, Corot is designed to hunt for "rocky" planets -- the first requirement, along with liquid water and a moderate temperature, for life as we know it.
Corot, pronounced "Coreau," is due to lift off on Wednesday aboard a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
The 170-million-euro (221-million-dollar) mission, 75-percent funded by France's National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), should open up a new front in the search for extrasolar planets.
"It's a small project, launched with few resources, but it is a pathfinder which will show future missions which kind of star to search," Annie Baglin of the Paris-Meudon Observatory, who is Corot's chief scientist, told AFP.
In 1995, two astronomers at the Geneva Observatory, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, spotted a planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi, about 50 light years away.
It was the first extrasolar planet ever recorded -- although, in truth, the sighting was indirect. Light from 51 Pegasi "wobbled" because it was deflected by gravitation around the large, Jupiter-sized planet.
The big interest for the general public is whether there is another Earth out there.
It would have to be a rocky planet that lies in the "Goldilocks zone" -- not so hot that its atmosphere is stripped away by solar radiation, nor so cold that it is a frozen ball. It has to be just right, to let water exist in liquid form.
clipped from: www.physorg.com