The CoRoT mission was proposed at a space science seminar in Saint Malo, France, in 1993, and approved in October 2000 by the CNES board of administration. It is part of a series of scientific missions using the Proteus multi-mission spacecraft bus, developed by CNES as a basis for several minisatellite to reduce mission design costs.

Several bilateral cooperation agreements have been established, with both scientific and technical objectives, to supply satellite elements and subsystems. The partners’ combined investment covers about 40% of the cost of the instruments and ground segment.

CoRoT successively observes different parts of the sky consecutively for about 80 to 150 days. The extent of its measurements, completed by shorter observation sequences, is enabling it to analyse the structure of more than 100 stars and to probe about 200,000 in its search for extrasolar planets.

As soon as the first series of observations had been completed at the beginning of 2007, the discovery of an exoplanet and the detection of stellar oscillations were announced. Scientists have since discovered a wealth of unknown pulsations in stars as varied as Sun analogues and red giants. Science teams have also announced the detection of 15 more widely varying objects. These include CoRoT-7b, the first confirmed Earth-like exoplanet; the very massive CoRoT-3b and CoRoT-15b, both probably halfway between a planet and a “failed” star not hot enough to shine; and CoRoT-9b, the 1st temperate exoplanet comparable to those in our solar system.