The CoRoT exoplanet programme : exploring the gas - giant / terrestrial planet transition

The CoRoT exoplanet programme: exploring the gas-giant/terrestrial planet transition Abstract. CoRoT, which was launched successfully on the 27 th of December 2006, is the first space mission to have the search for planetary transits at the heart of its science programme. It is expected to be able to detect transits of planets with radii down to approximately two Earth radii and periods up to approximately a month. Thus, CoRoT will explore the hereto uncharted area of parameter space which spans the transition between the gaseous giant planets discovered in large numbers from the ground, and terrestrial planets more akin to our own. This papers briefly sketches out the main technical characteristics of the mission before summarising estimates of its detection potential and presenting the data analysis and follow-up strategy. 1. The CoRoT mission 1.1. Brief history CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and Transits) is a modest scale satellite funded primarily by the French space agency CNES, with additional contributions from the European Space Agency Brazil. The project was first proposed to CNES as an asteroseismology mission in 1993. An exoplanet programme was added to the mission soon after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star (Mayor & Queloz 1995), and it soon became clear that a long baseline, high-precision stellar photometry mission had major potential in exo-planetology as well as in stellar structure and evolution (see Barge et al. 2006a). The new mission concept was formally selected by CNES in 2001, and CoRoT was launched on the 27 th of December 2006 after a successful development and integration phase.