FROM STARS TO HABITABLE PLANETS, THE AUSTRIAN CONTRIBUTION TO THE COROT MISSION

摘要

When in 2005 the COROT spacecraft will be launched, this will be an important step towards the detection of telluric exoplanets. A high-precision, wide-field, stellar photometer, designed to perform continuous long-term observations of star systems will be onboard the spacecraft. The COROT instrument will observe and analyse the brightness variations of up to 12000 targets simultaneously. One element of the processing chain is the Boitiers Extracteur, a computer system for extracting the star images out of the CCD data stream, which is developed by the Space Research Institute Graz. The key issue in the BEX design was the logic design of the pre-processors and the definition of the look-up table format to provide a maximum of flexibility by reasonable hardware effort.