Fridlund ahead!
From the spacEurope ages, there was a presence who marked the difference for the good will with which always replied to every solicitation, including the fact of making himself available to answer a set of questions posed directly by the readers.
That man was Malcolm Fridlund, ESA COROT Project Scientist.
For the inner interest of the mission itself but mostly for the reasons presented above, Fridlund was one of the first I have thought about to invite to be a regular visitor to this new home, with the announcement, already this month, of the discovery of the COROT-Exo-7b, the smallest terrestrial planet ever detected outside the Solar System, with a diameter less than twice that of Earth (1.7 Earth radii), no other person would be in a better place to tell us something about this new find.
So…we have good news…Malcolm accepted BEYOND THE CRADLE invitation and we will be able to 
read him at this blog giving us insights about COROT, what the mission has achieved, what work is currently being done, and expectations about what surprises might the future still bring.
Fridlund asked us only to wait a few weeks until his first chronicle since the first paper for COROT-Exo-7b (depicted in the illustration on the right) has been submitted only last night and the team is still working on the data for the radial velocity observations. COROT Project Scientist promised that when the RV paper is submitted he’ll have “something pretty” written for BEYOND THE CRADLE readers.
There we have some promising reading ahead…only something left to say…
Welcome dear Malcolm!
beyond the cradle 
The interview can be read at CNES http://www.cnes.fr/web/CNES-fr/7490-conversations-spatiales-mars-2009.php
Hi Rui today i have read an interesting interview with Pierre Barge (responsible of the CoRoT exoplanet research programme at Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille) where he says that they clearly expected to find more exoplanets by now”« Nous trouvons moitié moins de planètes que nous l’espérions » confirme Pierre Barge.”, they even postulated that there might be a problem with the methods of detection “« Cela nous a tellement intrigués que nous avons d’abord pensé qu’il y avait un problème dans les méthodes de détection.”
I know that there are some limitations with corot like the short span of time it takes staring at the same field.. but can this be the indication of something more? like limitations of the transit method? it would be interesting if Dr.Fridlund could say something more on corot last results.
Thanks
Hi!
Sorry for the late answer and…thank you for the kind words! 🙂
Regarding COROT discoveries and results don’t forget that the mission is not searching exclusively for exoplanets but it developing an extraordinary work on asteroseismology…
I know that expectations are high but…seven previously unknown planets orbiting other stars, including a possible missing link between stars and planets (COROT-Exo-3b) in two years of activity…
We’re becoming too demanding… 😉
And let us not forget that it takes time for the papers to come out…I leave you with this sentence from the mission’s 300th day:
“CoRoT is discovering exo-planets at a rate only set by the available resources to follow up the detections”.
ohh and is good to see you back 🙂 i loved space europe
I just don t get it why corot after 3 years of operation has only find 7 exoplanets i was expecting at least a lot of hot Jupiters dozens of them …