CoRoT logo and poster (Patrice Amoyel). Crédit : CNES

The satellite, orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 896 km, carries a telescope which can observe numerous stars, continously and during long periods of time, and measure their brightness variations at a high level of accuracy.

CoRoT was launched in 2006 and detects objects and phenomena that have never been observed before.

CoRoT has two main scientific objectives :

• To "observe" the interior of the stars, detecting and studying their oscillations methods of sismology.
• To research extrasolar planets, by detecting their passage before stars around which they orbit.

To do that, CoRoT measures with a high precision the brightness variations of selected stars, during very long periods of time.

CoRoT will gather with high accuracy an exceptional amount of data on the light variations of brightness for thousands of stars. It will also contribute to our understanding of other subjects, and it will study a wide range of other phenomena which appear with star brightness variations.

The CoRoT acronym recalls the main phenomena which CoRoT will enable us to understand, the Convection and the Rotation of the stars, as well as the Transists of extrasolar planets.