The project main steps

CoRoT spacecraft mission lasted 2137 days

The CoRoT space telescope is a mission of astronomy led by CNES in association with French laboratories (CNRS) and with several international partners (European countries, Brazil).

The spacecraft, belonging to the Proteus series, is equipped with a 27-cm diameter afocal telescope and a 4-CCD camera sensitive to tiny variations of the light intensity from stars.

The CoRoT instrument provides continuous observations of very long duration (up to 6 months) of the same stellar field. It is a photometer which measures the relative variations in time of the brightness of selected stars with a very high precision (less than 100 parts per million, far better than can be obtained from the ground).

Understand the CoRoT mission objectives viewing an animation

These characteristics constitute an entirely new kind of mission, and makes CoRoT a pioneering mission in stellar seismology and studies of exoplanets (the primary goals of the mission).

In the course of the mission CoRoT has obtained nearly 160,000 light curves (temporal variations in the brightness of a star). This includes 160 bright stars observed with very high precision and more than 150,000 fainter stars at a level that permits the detection of a number of exoplanets, to discover and interpret the vibrations of numerous stars, but also to address numerous other questions in stellar physics (in addition to the main scientific goals) such as activity, rotation, binarity...