The Corot stands for “Convection Rotation and planetary Transits”, a spacecraft has launched today from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to search for another ‘Earth’ in the solar system.
It is developed by the French space agency, CNES that is working with six international partners: European Space Agency (ESA) Austria, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Brazil. Corot will monitor about 120,000 stars with its 27cm telescope. On every 512 seconds it will measure the brightness of 10,000 stars. Professor Ian Roxburgh, an ESA scientist said that we are looking at habitable planets, not inhabited planets. He has been involved with the Corot since its inception. He further added that it was hoped that Corot would find rocky planets that could have atmosphere and water. Scientists can detect the size of the planet by measuring the minute changes in brightness of stars. Corot will monitor the brightness of stars, looking for the slight drop in light caused by the transit of a planet. The Corot works on “asteroseismology‘ in which it will study the acoustic waves that ripple across the surface of stars. Astronomers can calculate a star’s precise mass, age and chemical composition through the nature of the ripples
Astronomers expect to find between 10 and 40 rocky objects slightly larger than Earth and tens of new gas giants similar to our Jupiter. The first target of the Corot will be Milky Way, the centre of our galaxy. Its next will be in the direction of the constellation Orion. Every 150 days, Corot will move to a new field and begin observing again.
