|
|
Post by swamprat on Apr 15, 2018 15:33:54 GMT
Let's hope the Florida storms clear out.....
Watch launch of TESS planet-hunting mission April 16By Eleanor Imster in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | April 15, 2018
TESS will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Lift-off is planned for no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT (10:32 p.m. UTC).
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday evening (April 16, 2018.) Once in orbit, TESS will spend about two years surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for planets outside our solar system.
To watch the launch, tune in to NASA TV. Lift-off is planned for no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT (10:32 UTC). Prelaunch mission coverage will begin on Sunday, April 15, with three live briefings. Watch here: www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html#public
According to a NASA statement:
TESS is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets, including those that could support life. The mission is expected to catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.
Read more: earthsky.org/space/kepler-tess-in-exoplanet-search
Bottom line: The TESS planet-hunting mission will (maybe) launch on April 16, 2018.
earthsky.org/space/watch-launch-tess-planet-hunting-mission-april16-2018
|
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on May 20, 2018 14:26:01 GMT
TESS planet-hunter snaps 1st test image, swings by moon
By Deborah Byrd in SPACE | May 19, 2018
How many unseen worlds orbit these stars? The TESS planet-hunter is designed to find nearby exoplanets, between 30 and 300 light-years away.
This is the 1st test image from the newly launched TESS planet-hunter, showing a swath of the southern sky along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. The edge of the Coalsack Nebula is in the right upper corner and the bright star Beta Centauri is visible at the lower left edge. TESS is expected to cover more than 400 times as much sky as shown in this image with its 4 cameras during its initial 2-year search for exoplanets. Image via NASA/MIT/TESS.
NASA’s new planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – aka TESS – completed a successful lunar flyby on May 17, 2018. The flyby took place almost one month to the day after the craft’s April 18 launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. TESS swept about 5,000 miles (8,000 km) from the moon’s surface, in the process receiving a gravity boost from the moon that’ll help the craft achieve its final working orbit. In addition, the TESS science team used one of the spacecraft’s four cameras to snap a two-second test image (shown above), centered on the southern constellation Centaurus and showing more than 200,000 stars.
How many unseen worlds orbit these stars? TESS won’t probe them all (it’s designed for nearby stars), but it’ll find some of them!
Since its April 18 launch, TESS has undergone five of six scheduled thruster burns. It has traveled in a series of progressively more elongated orbits to reach the moon. NASA said TESS will undergo a final thruster burn on May 30 to enter its 13.7-day science orbit around Earth. The highly elliptical final orbit is designed to maximize the amount of sky the spacecraft can image.
NASA is expected to release the science-quality image from TESS – the spacecraft’s official first light image – in June. TESS is expected to begin science operations in mid-June.
See Tess's unique orbit HERE:
www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=-AIbD2WxyN8
TESS is the successor to the Kepler spacecraft, which discovered some 2,300 exoplanets over the course of its lifetime. NASA said in March that Kepler is expected to run out of fuel entirely within the next few months.
Unlike Kepler – which has a fixed field of view of the sky – TESS will search for exoplanets in some 85 percent of Earth’s sky. Scientists have divided the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will use its four wide-field cameras to map 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky during its first year of observations and 13 sectors of the northern sky during the second year.
TESS will be watching for phenomena called transits. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its star from the observer’s perspective, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. More than 78 percent of the confirmed exoplanets – including those found by Kepler – have been found using transits, NASA said.
Most of Kepler’s exoplanets orbit faint stars between 300 and 3,000 light-years from Earth. TESS will focus on much closer stars – between 30 and 300 light-years away – and some 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets.
The brightness of these target stars will allow future researchers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planet’s capacity to harbor life.
Go, TESS!
earthsky.org/space/tess-planet-hunter-test-image-lunar-gravity-assist
|
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Jul 28, 2018 15:48:59 GMT
NASA's New Planet Hunter Begins Its Search for Alien Worlds
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer | July 28, 2018
An artist's depiction of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) at work (not shown to scale). Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA's newest planet-hunting telescope is officially at work.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is designed to hunt for alien worlds around stars not too far from the sun, began gathering science data Wednesday (July 25), members of the instrument team announced yesterday (July 27).
TESS will send that initial data to Earth in August, with new observations arriving every 13.5 days after that, mission team members said in a statement.
"I'm thrilled that our planet hunter is ready to start combing the backyard of our solar system for new worlds," Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics division, said in the statement. "With possibly more planets than stars in our universe, I look forward to the strange, fantastic worlds we're bound to discover."
TESS launched on April 18 into orbit around Earth and then underwent a period of testing to ensure the instrument was ready to use. It sent its first photograph, a test image, down to its handlers in May. That image showed 200,000 individual stars, many of which could be accompanied by at least one planet.
TESS follows in the footsteps of NASA's iconic Kepler telescope, which in the course of two missions has identified 2,650 confirmed exoplanets, according to the space agency. Like Kepler, TESS will look for tiny dips in the brightness of individual stars caused by a planet passing between its star and the telescope in its orbit.
But whereas Kepler was limited to poring over a small patch of sky during its primary mission, TESS will study almost all of the sky in its two planned years of observations. During that survey, it will focus on the 200,000 brightest stars in the sky — which means the project should identify planets around many of the stars that skywatchers know and love.
The team that designed TESS has calculated that the instrument should spot about 1,600 new exoplanets, including some the size of Earth.
Some planets TESS spots will likely become targets for follow-up study by NASA's much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to study the atmospheres of those planets and begin characterizing them in more detail than TESS can manage.
www.space.com/41306-tess-exoplanet-telescope-starts-science-observations.html
|
|
