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NASA Sends TESS to Space!

April 18, 2018

Lora Snow

NASA’s newest planet hunter is in space. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was carried into space today by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.at 6:51 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Liftoff of TESS. Credit: NASAKenedy

TESS will search about 85 percent of the sky for exoplanets—planets outside of our own solar system.” TESS will use the transit method to search for the exoplanets. This method involves looking for distant eclipses, otherwise known as transits.

Eclipses are not unique to the earth, our moon, and the sun. They also happen elsewhere in our solar system, such as when Venus passed in front of the sun, from our point of view on earth, in 2012. It looked like a dark spot passing across the sun. The same thing also happens beyond our solar system

NASA's New Planet Hunter: TESS Credit: NASA Goddard

When distant planets pass in front of their stars, it causes a dip in the brightness of the star, as viewed from our location. These transits can be detected trillions of miles away by watching a star with a very sensitive camera, such as the cameras TESS is carrying. Repetitive, periodic dips can indicate a planet or planets orbiting the star.

TESS will survey the sky sector by sector over the next two years, studying each of the 26 sectors for about 27 days. This will give it time to survey about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun in its search for exoplanets ranging from earth-sized to larger than Jupiter.

Focusing its search for planets orbiting bright nearby stars will

make it easier for scientists to study the exoplanets TESS finds. They would like to learn about the planets’ composition, such as whether they are rocky, gaseous, or something else. They would also like to learn which of the planets have atmospheres, and what they are composed of, such as whether or not they contain water.

TESS is not the first spacecraft to search for exoplanets. The Kepler spacecraft, which was launched on March 7, 2009, searches for exoplanets via the transit method. On April 13, 2018, NASA announced the Kepler spacecraft has found 2653 confirmed exoplanets and 2724 candidate exoplanets.