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PARIS, Nov. 21, 2006/Satnews Daily/ ― The
Corot scientific satellite built by French space agency CNES as prime
contractor has left the Alcatel Alenia Space plant in Cannes on its way
to the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Alcatel said Arianespace will
launch this satellite by Christmas, using a Soyuz 2-1b launch vehicle.
The Corot mission is a world first, with French space agency CNES
leading a number of French laboratories (from national scientific
research agency CNRS), and participants from the international
scientific community, mainly in Europe (ESA, plus partners in Germany,
Austria, Belgium and Spain), but also in Brazil.
The Corot mission has two main objectives. The first is to study the
internal structure of stars using asteroseismology (observation of
oscillation modes, which indirectly sounds the interior of stars). Corot
will study hundreds of stars for nearly three years, in order to
determine their mass, age and composition. This is a key to better
understanding our universe, since it is in stars, at different phases of
their life, that the chemical elements making up the universe are
formed.
The second mission objective is the detection of planets outside our
solar system, by measuring changes in the observed visual brightness
when a planet passes in front of its parent star's disc (transit
method). Scientists believe that they will be able to discover from a
few to several tens of "exoplanets" with diameters of up to about 1.5
times the diameter of the Earth, in configurations that resemble the
solar system in terms of type of star and orbit.
The Corot mission marks the third use of the Proteus platform developed
by Alcatel Alenia Space in collaboration with CNES. The first is the
Jason-1 oceanographic altimetry satellite, which recently celebrated its
fifth year in orbit. The second is the Calipso climatology satellite,
part of a French-American climate study program, which was launched in
April 2006 to join the so-called "A-Train" constellation, forming an
exceptional space observatory.
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