Interview: Malcolm Fridlund

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COROT - First Spacecraft To Search for Earth-like, Rocky Planets

27 Dec, 2006 06:55 pm

The first spacecraft devoted to searching for planets like Earth, COROT, will be launched December 27th. The mission will last two and a half years. It is expected to find many "hot Jupiters", certainly expanding our knowledge of the universe. Dr. Malcolm Fridlund, ESA Project Manager for COROT, recently spoke with us about COROT's aims.

What do you expect to observe with COROT?

What we hope, exactly, is to do the first observations of rocky planets, which are planets that are so small that they resemble our Earth. They will be a little bit bigger, but we hope to have the first positive identification of planets that are of the same kind as our own orbiting around other stars, which would be a very big discovery indeed.

Several recent studies showed that there might be much more small rocky planets in the Universe than previously expected. Can COROT confirm or refute this hypothesis?

If there are more rocky planets than previously expected, then COROT will pick up a large number of them, giving us a good idea about how many there are. At the same time, if that hypothesis is wrong�that there are fewer rocky planets than expected or hoped for�COROT will, again, be able to tell us. COROT will look at 100s of 1000s of stars and, of course, if there are a lot of planets, COROT will pick up many of these planets. (If there are very few of them, COROT will still pick up a few, but there will be much less.) We will be able to get a good handle on the number, on the presence, of rocky planets, but the caveat is, of course, that we don�t get down to the really small rocky planets, we can only get down to ones a little bit larger than the Earth.

COROT will target at least 50 specific stars for a detailed study in this way. How did you select these stars?

The 50 stars that COROT will especially study are stars that have some very interesting properties of their own that we�ll want to look at, but we will be doing pointings. Each pointing that we do, there will be several thousand parties we will have selected; the stars we have selected are stars that resemble our Sun. We don�t select stars that are too different from our Sun, although there is a wide spectrum of sources, [because they will be more likely to have rocky planets]. The 50 stars that we have selected have been selected because they themselves are inherently interesting and may turn out to have planets too. COROT has 2 objectives: one objective is the search for and identification of rocky planets. The second objective is to look at micro-variation in stellar flux, which indicate the conditions deep inside stars. We have been able to do with this with the Sun, mainly within the last two years with the ISOSOLAR spacecraft, but we have never really done it for other stars. The observations we�ve done from the ground are for a handful of stars showing that this method works, but such precision in measurement has never been achieved in stellar photometry; therefore, we haven�t been able to peek into the stars to the nuclear furnace at the center.

Can you describe to us COROT�s telescope?

COROT�s telescope is like the Hubble space telescope, but much smaller. It is a 30 cm telescope, which sounds rather small. There are amateur telescopes that are that big, but we�ve done extremely high optical precision in the manufacturing. The mechanical manufacturing of the tubes, baffling, etc. have been extremely difficult and have really taxed the knowledge of the engineers and scientists, pushing everything to the limit. We hope to measure down to one point in 100,000 changes in light flux, which is somewhere around 100 to 1000 times better than anything that has been achieved so far with very large telescopes on the ground. This, of course, is because we lift the spacecraft above the atmosphere, but also because the optical quality is extremely good. The telescope has been manufactured in Europe and it has really brought French, Belgian, Spanish, German, among others, technology forward. It has been very enthusing to work on this project.

COROT will be followed by the Kepler and Darwin missions. Does this mean that the planet hunt is on?

Yes, I would say so. It is very clear from all evaluations done by all scientific bodies, such as NASA, ESA, National Science Agencies, that this is one of the key topics for the next few decades. It begins with the search for Earth-like planets, then spotting their conditions, and eventually finding out with missions like Darwin whether life exists on them or not. (Life as we know it, of course.) This comes in a step-wise approach and COROT is the first step, which is very exciting.

Interviewer: Hopefully, COROT will pave the way.
Dr. Fridlund: Yes, I hope so too.

Dr. Malcolm Fridlund is the European Space Agency's Project Scientist for COROT.

Interview by: Thanh-Tam Candice Vu

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