According to the website Spaceflight Now, a Russian Soyuz 2-1b rocket with the European COROT space observatory launched at 1423 GMT (9:23 a.m. EST) from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. The French-led COROT mission will look for rocky planets around other stars.
Flying high
above the Earth's atmosphere, the Convection Rotation and planetary Transits
(COROT) satellite [[image] will use a different technique better suited to finding
smaller worlds. Called the "transit" technique [image], it will detect extrasolar planets by measuring the dip in
starlight their passage creates as they glide across the face of their parent
stars.
COROT's 27
centimeter (10.6 inch) lens will monitor the brightness of the stars, looking
for the slight dip in starlight caused by the planet's passage. COROT will be
able to monitor hundreds of thousands of stars simultaneously and will turn its
unblinking eye toward different parts of the sky for 150 days at a time. COROT
is expected to find between 10 to 40 rocky worlds over the course of its two
and a half year mission, along with tens of new gas giant planets.
As it's
observing a star for signs of a planet's passage, COROT will also watch for "starquakes," acoustical waves generated deep inside stars which
ripple across a star's surface, altering its brightness. This information can
be used to calculate a star's precise mass, age and chemical composition.
In 2008,
NASA will launch Kepler, a space telescope that works in the same way as COROT, but
which will be able to detect the first Earth-sized planets in similar orbits to
our own world.
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