July 18, 2016

Release of the CoRoT legacy data

The CoRoT team has recently released the mission full science data set.

This is the result of years of effort to re-analyse the raw data and eliminate the various contaminating signals produced by the instrument and the spacecraft. Among them we cite the crucial problem of sudden peaks and discontinuities induced by cosmic ray bombardment, the aging of the instrument and systematic bias on the detectors.

Light curves (temporal series of stellar flux measurements) of more than 160,000 stars from our galaxy are now available to the international scientific community at the CoRoT archive, at the Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg and also at the two mirror sites in the US and in Spain .

Light curves

They are a goldmine for investigations of exoplanets, stars, structure of our galaxy and more generally any research based on ultra-high precision stellar photometry.

They also contribute to the preparation of future large space missions, in particular PLATO, the European successor of CoRoT.

The “CoRoT Legacy Book”, which describes these data and their correction methods, the most recent highlights up to now and the new space projects that inherit from CoRoT, will be published very soon.