Undreamed Shores - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 250

a series of small mirrors that corrected the problem. With its range of
light-collecting instruments that see in ultraviolet, near infrared, and
visible light, Hubble has gazed into the depths of space, revealing the
age of the universe, the birth of stars—and it has detected a few dis-
tant planets too. But Hubble is an all-purpose telescope. Finding plan-
ets is specialist work, and two purpose-built space telescopes have
now been sent into orbit in search of alien planets. They have found
them—in their hundreds.
The European Space Agency's COROT satellite was launched at the
end of 2006, and began collecting data in early 2007. Its name stands
for 'COnvection ROtation et Transits planétaires' and seems only by
chance to be synonymous with the great pre-Impressionist painter
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). Corot seems to have no con-
nection with astronomy, 155 but perhaps the name is apt. In his deli-
cate, unshowy landscapes and portraits, he followed the advice of his
teacher, Achille-Etna Michallon, to 'render with the utmost scrupu-
lousness everything that I saw before me'. Both COROT and Corot
have shown, indeed, an exquisite sensitivity in the delicate capture
of light.
In March 2009, the Kepler space telescope was launched by NASA.
Here the attribution is quite clear and non-acronymic. This mission
was named after Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the great German math-
ematician, astronomer, and (as was common in those days) astrolo-
ger. Kepler was an early defender (along with Bruno and Galileo) of
the Copernican model of the solar system, introduced physics into
astronomy, and discovered that the orbits of the planets of our solar
system were eccentric, not circular.
Both COROT and Kepler were designed specifically to look for exo-
planets by means of the transit method, scanning areas of space in
which there are hundreds of thousands of stars and looking for the
telltale slight, regular dips in brightness as a planet comes between