Cambridge Journals Online

Contributed Papers

CoRoT: pioneer space mission for exoplanet transit search

Pierre Bargea1, Annie Baglina2, Michel Auvergnea2 and the CoRoT team a1 Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille LAM/OAMP - BP8 - 13376 - Marseille - Cedex 12 - France email: pierre.barge@oamp.fr a2 Laboratoire d'Etudes Spatiales et d'Instrumentation en Astrophysique LESIA/OPM - 5 pl. J. Janssen, F-92195 Meudon, France

Article author query barge p   baglin a   auvergne m

Abstract

Led by the CNES space agency the CoRoT mission is born from a joint effort of France, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Spain and ESA. In orbit around the Earth, CoRoT started its first observations in February 2007 and is, now, regularly producing ten thousand light-curves with a very high accuracy. Performances are better than expected and some Hot Jupiters have already been detected in the raw data. Once the fully corrected data will be delivered, much smaller transits should be detected giving access to the hot Neptunes and the big Terrestrial planet families. We briefly describes the status of the mission, the inflight performance and the ground based program follow up strategy. We also present some preliminary results issued from a first analysis of the data.

Key Words: instrumentation: photometers; planets and satellites: formation; stars: binaries: eclipsing; stars: variables: delta Scuti; stars: variables: other