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COROT instruments

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Photo of the COROT's telescope being prepared for a 'first-light' test on ground.

Credits: CNES

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COROT will be placed on a circular, polar orbit that will allow for continuous observations of two large and opposite regions in the sky for more than 150 days each.

Within each region there are many selected fields that will be monitored in turn. The reason for the oppositely sited regions is that, because of the Earth’s movement around the Sun, the sun’s rays start to interfere with the observations after 150 days. COROT then rotates by 180 degrees and start observing the other region.

Credits: CNES

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This photo shows the focal unit of the wide-field camera mounted on board the COROT satellite. The camera, operating in the visible, consists of two parts, one for each of the two mission objectives: detection of exoplanets and asteroseismology.

Credits: CNES/LESIA

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This photo shows the wide-field camera on board the COROT satellite. The camera consists of two parts, one for each of the two mission objectives (exoplanet search and asteroseismology), and operates in the visible. Both mission goals require the camera to be sensitive to changes in a star's light of just one part in one hundred thousand.

During the mission, the COROT telescope will collect the light from thousands of stars and feed it into the camera.

Credits: CNES/LESIA

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This sketch shows a typical COROT image spot. The analysis of the 3-colour light curves that COROT will gather (thanks to a dispersion device - a prism - mounted in front of the exoplanet channel camera detectors, or CCD’s), will make it possible to distinguish among the different families of detected events (transits, stellar activity, eclipsing binaries).

In fact, planetary transits are achromatic events, while stellar activity – even though still badly known – are expected to be highly chromatic due to temperature variations.

Credits: CNES/LESIA

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A prism, allowing to get a color image of stars, is installed in front of the COROT camera's exoplanet detectors. It will enable to distinguish the stellar activity from a planetary transit (for the brightest stars).

Credits: CNES/LESIA

Last update: 29 November 2006

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