A Russian rocket has launched a French space telescope that will try to search for planets beyond the solar system, officials said.

The French satellite Corot, launched aboard a Soyuz-2 rocket from Kazakhstan on Wednesday, will search for planets amid 120,000 stars.The French satellite Corot, launched aboard a Soyuz-2 rocket from Kazakhstan on Wednesday, will search for planets amid 120,000 stars.
(Associated Press)
A Russian Soyuz-2-1B rocket on Wednesday blasted off from the the Baikonur cosmodrome as scheduled at 5:23 p.m. Moscow time (9:23 a.m. ET), carrying with it the COROT satellite, said Russian Federal Space Agency spokesman Igor Panarin.

"The launch was conducted without a hitch," he said.

The COROT mission is being led by the French national space agency, CNES. The telescope will monitor about 120,000 stars, and scientists hope that it will locate many yet unknown planets during its two-and-a-half-year mission.

CNES's partners are the European Space Agency, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Brazil.

Wednesday's launch was the first for the Soyuz-2-1B rocket, a modernized version of Soyuz, a workhorse of the Soviet and Russian space programs.