Cosmic Connexion

In the 1970s,the American space probes Pioneer and Voyager were sent off carrying a message for any intelligent life forms they might meet.More than thirty years later, a television channel launches another hopeful signal into the sky. In autumn 2006, the European space programme put the COROT satellite into orbit. One of its main missions was to look for extrasolar planets,including so-called telluric planets, which are similar to the Earth. On 30 September at 20:45 a special programme was shown on ARTE and simultaneously beamed into space by a CNES (French Space Center) antenna.The substance of the programme is formed by the most incredible exchanges between Earth and space: fiction and documentary film excerpts, drawings, songs, animation, archives, and webcam images.With this programme, we put the tremendous communication tool of radio waves to good use: they carry the images and sounds of CosmicConnexion at the speed of light over astronomical distances.