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A European spacecraft took off today to spearhead the search for another “Earth” among the stars.The Corot space telescope blasted off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly after 2.20pm.

Corot, short for convection rotation and planetary transits, is the first instrument capable of finding small rocky planets beyond the solar system. Any such planet situated in the right orbit stands a good chance of having liquid water on its surface, and quite possibly life, although a leading scientist involved in the project said it was unlikely to find “any little green men“. [Continue]

Filed under: Science by lrenz