Several presentations have focused on the CoRoT heritage in terms of technical innovations developed to obtain long term stability of the photometric measurement, but also in terms of management in order to handle the extremely short development phase and the interactions between the different partners : CNES, Scientific laboratories and foreign European and Brazilian agencies.
The final treatment, taking advantage of the ten years experience on the CoRoT data, has been presented to the community. "Ready to use N2 CoRoT data " are now available at the mission centre, at Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg and at two mirror sites and https://sdc.cab.inta-csic.es/corotfa/.
The numerous scientific results in terms of exoplanet discoveries and stellar structure have been highlighted. The exoplanet-hunting program, completed with intensive ground-based observations, allowed the precise characterization of a large variety of exoplanets, renewing our understanding of planet formation.
The pulsations of several tens of thousands of stars have been measured and the seismology techniques are used to scrutiny the internal constitution and the rotation of stars along their evolution.
Beyond these two domains, which were the core programme of the mission, CoRoT has initiated new applications in various domains from stellar activity to star-planets interactions. These domains developed rapidly under the impulse of CoRoT data soon followed by the Kepler [2] observations. Among them, Galactic archeology has been renewed thanks to CoRoT and Kepler results on red giant stars, allowing to estimate masses, radii and evolution stages for several tens of thousands of red giant stars in the Galaxy.
The future missions Echo and PLATO, which are direct heiress of CoRoT have been presented. A few days after the first delivery of Gaia results, high precision photometry from space clearly appears as an unavoidable tool for astronomers in the decades to come.
And finally, the more distant and very exciting future has been sketched.
[1] The CoRoT Legacy book is on line at http://www.edp-open.org/books-in-english#The-CoRoT-Legacy-Book
[2] Kepler is a NASA mission dedicated to the search of terrestrial exoplanets launched about two years after CoRoT in 2009
Last update on 21 December 2021