The CoRoT satellite in flight : description and performance

By M. Auvergne, P. Bodin, L. Boisnard, J. Buey, S. Chaintreuil, C. Team. 2009

571 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context. CoRoT is a space telescope dedicated to stellar seismology and the search for extrasolar planets. The mission is led by the CNES in association with French laboratories and has a large international participation. The European Space Agency (ESA), Austria, Belgium, and Germany contribute to the payload, and Spain and Brazil contribute to the ground segment. Development of the spacecraft, which is based on a PROTEUS low earth orbit (LEO) recurrent platform, commenced in October 2000, and the satellite was launched on December 27, 2006. Aims. The instrument and platform characteristics prior to launch have been described in ESA publication (SP-1306). In the present paper we explain the behaviour in flight, based on raw and corrected data. Methods. Five runs have been completed since January 2007. The data used here are essentially those acquired during the commissioning phase and from a long run that lasted 146 days. These enable us to give a complete overview of the instrument and platform behaviour for all environmental conditions. The ground based data processing is not described in detail because the most important method has been published elsewhere. Results. We show that the performance specifications are easily satisfied when the environmental conditions are favourable. Most of the perturbations, hence data corrections, are related to LEO perturbations: high energy particles inside the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), eclipses and temperature variations, and line of sight fluctuations due to the attitude control system. Straylight due to the reflected light from the earth, which is controlled by the telescope and baffle design, appears to be negligible.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7542fcb0b02220ef452d88874450fad8f8606c13

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• The GALAH survey: observational overview and Gaia DR1 companion (2016, background): “CoRoT observed one large region in the direction of the Galactic centre and one toward the anticentre, both at declination near zero, potentially providing common targets for GALAH and other ongoing Galactic archaeology surveys.”
• Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission (2009, unknown): “An overview of the global performance of the CoRoT Observatory after the launch and two years of activity can be found in Auvergne et al. (2009).”
• A new correction of stellar oscillation frequencies for near-surface effects (2014, background): “By testing the new pipeline on data for a synthetic target, the Sun, and the CoRoT target HD 52265, we have shown that these parametrizations give unbiased results that are compatible with independent measurements and model fits.”
• HYBRID γ DORADUS–δ SCUTI PULSATORS: NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE PHYSICS OF THE OSCILLATIONS FROM KEPLER OBSERVATIONS (2010, background): “The Kepler data on γDor and δ Sct stars promise to help us to answer a number of outstanding questions: why have Kepler (and CoRoT ) detected a significant number of hybrids, whereas theory predicts the existence of hybrids in only a small overlapping region of the instability strips?”
• MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): BINARIES, PULSATIONS, AND EXPLOSIONS (2015, background): “…that nearly all γ Doradus and δ Scuti stars are hybrid pulsators, and the detection of solar-like oscillations in a large sample of red giants (Auvergne et al. 2009; De Ridder et al. 2009; Grigahcène et al. 2010; Bedding et al. 2010; ChristensenDalsgaard & Thompson 2011; Chaplin & Miglio…”
• Origin and evolution of the atmospheres of early Venus, Earth and Mars (2018, background): “Due to the huge number of exoplanets confirmed in recent years (e.g., Pollacco et al. 2006; Bakos et al. 2004; Auvergne et al. 2009; Borucki et al. 2010; Howe et al. 2014), a large population of planets with masses slightly larger than Solar System terrestrial planets but with over-sized radii,…”
• The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) (2007, unknown): “Incorporation of the Kepler Field: The success of ESA’s CoRoT mission (Auvergne et al. 2009) and NASA’s Kepler mission (Borucki et al. 2010), and, in particular, the asteroseismology programs for each (Michel et al. 2008; Chaplin et al. 2010; Gilliland et al. 2010) — through which non-radial…”
• Stellar limb-darkening coefficients for CoRot and Kepler (2009, methodology): “The model specific intensities were first integrated at each angle using the CoRot PF white-light (Auvergne et al. 2009) and Kepler2 response functions.”
• Planets and Stellar Activity: Hide and Seek in the CoRoT-7 system (2013, methodology): “CoRoT-7 (average V-mag = 11.67) was observed with the CoRoT satellite (Auvergne et al. 2009) from 2012 January 10 to March 29.”
• CSI 2264: SIMULTANEOUS OPTICAL AND INFRARED LIGHT CURVES OF YOUNG DISK-BEARING STARS IN NGC 2264 WITH CoRoT and SPITZER—EVIDENCE FOR MULTIPLE ORIGINS OF VARIABILITY (2014, background): “Correction of light curve systematics CoRoT light curves include a number of well known systematic effects, including outliers and flux discontinuities due to radiation events or changes in detector temperature (Auvergne et al. 2009).”
• Red-giant seismic properties analyzed with CoRoT (2010, methodology): “In this paper, we specifically focus on the statistical analysis of a large set of stars in two different fields observed with CoRoT (Auvergne et al., 2009).”
• The universal red-giant oscillation pattern; an automated determination with CoRoT data (2010, background): “The vertical lines at 23.2µHz are the signature of the low-Earth orbit (Auvergne et al. 2009).”
• PASTIS: Bayesian extrasolar planet validation. I. General framework, models, and performance (2014, methodology): “As a test, we have verified that the Besançon galactic model (Robin et al. 2003), combined with the three-dimensional Galactic extinction model of Amôres & Lépine (2005), reproduces the stellar counts obtained from the EXODAT catalogue (Deleuil et al. 2009) in a CoRoT Galactic-centre field.”
• The NASA Exoplanet Archive: Data and Tools for Exoplanet Research (2013, methodology): “CoRoT is a space telescope operated by the French space agency CNES that takes high-precision photometric data to search for exoplanets and to conduct stellar seismology (Auvergne et al. 2009).”
• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Pulsating Variable Stars, Rotation, Convective Boundaries, and Energy Conservation (2019, background): “The exceptional precision of stellar brightness measurements achieved by the planet-hunting space telescopes Kepler/K2 (Borucki et al. 2010; Howell et al. 2014) and CoRoT (Auvergne et al. 2009) ushered in a new era in stellar photometric variability investigations.”