Dali House

Corot surveys Corot’s “Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld”.

French rocket scientists have asserted that Corot, the name of their just-launched planet-hunting spacecraft, stands for COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits, but it’s pretty obvious that somewhere in the midst of their planners and designers is a guy who knows his art history.

Face it, if the satellite namers really wanted to call this one Convection, Rotation and Planetary Transits, it would be CRPT, but in English that might come out looking like something between “crap” and “crackpot”, so they called in the arty guy.

“Well,” we can hear him meekly suggesting (in French, of course), “there was the painter Camille Corot, who travelled a great deal around the countryside looking for subject matter.”

Magnifique!

Packing a telescope and cameras, the spacecraft Corot, which the Russians shot into space from Kazakhstan on December 27, is going to spend the next couple of years trying to find a second Earth among the rocky planets orbiting other stars.

This Corot will orbit more than 500 miles above Earth for a better look at the “Goldilocks” regions of space, in solar systems where star heat is neither too hot nor too cold to sustain liquid water, but just right for extraterrestrial life.

Five hundred miles doesn’t seem much of a trip compared to the epic treks of other space-scouring missions, but Corot — free of Kazakh grit and New York light pollution — will be able to monitor stars “up to 10,000 million million miles away”. (What is that anway, a vermillion?)

Corot the painter was a travellin’ man, meandering all up and down France and having a gander at England, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Italy, and as an artist he was revered by everyone from Delacroix to Picasso. But he’s also fondly remembered as a swell guy. He raked in major francage in his dusky years and forked over a vast sum to poor people in besieged Paris, bought a house for dumb-luck Daumier and supported Millet’s widow and her kids. He backed a daycare centre too.

It’s to be hoped that Corot the floating telescope is just as generous with the children it discovers, and that the other skywatchers due to join it in a few years are also helpful. In 2015 the European Space Agency’s Darwin mission will involve four or five space telescopes, and NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder is off on a scouting mission about the same time.

I like NASA’s plain and simple “hey-kids-try-this” name for its project, none of the clumsiness of the Corot acronym. Darwin is another evolving muck of worms altogether. We’ll see how far that one gets.

Below, a Russian Soyuz-Fregat booster prepares to heave Corot the voyeur into space, my image based on an Associated Press photo.