Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Earth’s one remaining exoplanet spacecraft is officially done for

Graeme McMillan
By

COROTA moment of silence, please, for the end of the COROT space mission – and with it, the end of an entire type of space exploration altogether. Well, at least temporarily.

New Scientist reports that the COROT mission (short for “COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits,” in case you were curious) has been officially terminated, following the complete failure of the computer system on board the spacecraft itself. Launched in December 2006 by the French Space Agency working with the support of the European Space Agency, the COROT mission was the first time a craft had been sent into space with the express purpose of detecting transiting extrasolar planets, laying the groundwork for NASA’s Kepler mission.

Recommended Videos

According to New Scientist, the last remaining computer onboard the COROT craft stopping receiving information from its 10 inch telescope last November, essentially rendering it useless. Since that time, scientists at the French Space Agency have been in constant contact with the computer, trying to fix the problem remotely and jumpstart the program. Unfortunately, that turned out to be impossible. “All the trials have not been successful, so now we have decided to stop the investigation,” scientist Olivier La Marle told New Scientist.

Related

This doesn’t mean that COROT was a failure, La Marle points out. After all, the mission went on twice as long as was originally planned, discovering more than 30 confirmed planets and about 100 planet candidate along the way. Nonetheless, La Marle said, “You’re always disappointed [by a situation like this]. You learn so much from a mission like COROT that you always want to extend it.”

Currently, COROT is in Earth orbit, but it’s been decided that the price of sending astronauts up to manually repair the problem would equal or even dwarf the cost of simply creating a new COROT-style craft altogether. Instead, COROT is expected to eventually fall out of orbit and burn up during re-entry. Both the European Space Agency and NASA have new exoplanet missions launching in 2017, but until then, COROT’s failure will mean that any exoplanet research carried out for the next four years will be conducted solely on the ground.

Of the two 2017 missions, the ESA’s Characterising Exoplanets Satellite will be looking for signs of habitability on known planets, while NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will instead be looking for new star-crossing worlds, focusing in particular on smaller planets near stars.

Although exoplanet work is grounded for the next few years, don’t assume that nothing is going to be done in that area. La Marle says the success of COROT and NASA’s Kepler has inspired new ground-based observatories to begin work, and for everyone else, there’s still a lot of information gathered by the space-bound telescopes to go through. Even if COROT’s science days are over, the overall mission continues.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Graeme McMillan
Graeme McMillan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A transplant from the west coast of Scotland to the west coast of America, Graeme is a freelance writer with a taste for pop…
See the weather patterns on a wild, super hot exoplanet
This is an artist’s impression of the exoplanet WASP 121-b, also known as Tylos. The exoplanet’s appearance is based on Hubble data of the object. Using Hubble observations, another team of scientists had previously reported the detection of heavy metals such as magnesium and iron escaping from the upper atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet, marking it as the first of such detection. The exoplanet is orbiting dangerously close to its host star, roughly 2.6% of the distance between Earth and the Sun, placing it on the verge of being ripped apart by its host star's tidal forces. The powerful gravitational forces have altered the planet's shape.

When it comes to understanding exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, the big challenge is in not only finding these planets, but also understanding what they are like. And one of the biggest factors that scientists are interested in is whether an exoplanet has an atmosphere and, if so, what it is composed of. But, just like with weather here on Earth, exoplanet atmospheres aren't static. So the Hubble Space Telescope was recently used for an intriguing observation -- comparing data from an exoplanet atmosphere that had previously been observed, to see how it changed over time.

Hubble looked at planet WASP-121 b, an extreme planet that is so close to its star that a year there lasts just 30 hours. Its surface temperatures are over 3,000 Kelvins, or 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which researchers predict would lead to some wild weather phenomena. As it is such an extreme planet, WASP-121 b is well-known and has been observed by Hubble several times over the years, beginning in 2016.

Read more
Juice spacecraft gears up for first ever Earth-moon gravity boost
Artist's impression of ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) approaching Earth.

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s Juice mission is heading to Jupiter, but it isn't traveling all that way in a straight line. Instead, like most solar system missions, the spacecraft makes use of the gravity of other planets to give it a push on its way.

But Juice will be making an unusual maneuver next year, carrying out the first gravity assist flyby around both Earth and the moon. This week, the spacecraft made its longest maneuver yet to get into position ahead of the first of its kind flyby in 2024.

Read more
How astronomers used James Webb to detect methane in the atmosphere of an exoplanet
An artists rendering of a blue and white exoplanet known as WASP-80 b, set on a star-studded black background. Alternating horizontal layers of cloudy white, grey and blue cover the planets surface. To the right of the planet, a rendering of the chemical methane is depicted with four hydrogen atoms bonded to a central carbon atom, representing methane within the exoplanet's atmosphere. An artist’s rendering of the warm exoplanet WASP-80 b whose color may appear bluish to human eyes due to the lack of high-altitude clouds and the presence of atmospheric methane identified by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, similar to the planets Uranus and Neptune in our own solar system.

One of the amazing abilities of the James Webb Space Telescope is not just detecting the presence of far-off planets, but also being able to peer into their atmospheres to see what they are composed of. With previous telescopes, this was extremely difficult to do because they lacked the powerful instruments needed for this kind of analysis, but scientists using Webb recently announced they had made a rare detection of methane in an exoplanet atmosphere.

Scientists studied the planet WASP-80 b using Webb's NIRCam instrument, which is best known as a camera but also has a slitless spectroscopy mode which allows it to split incoming light into different wavelengths. By looking at which wavelengths are missing because they have been absorbed by the target, researchers can tell what an object -- in this case, a planetary atmosphere -- is composed of.

Read more