NASA's TESS spacecraft begins tracking planets around nearby stars |

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ABOVE THE VIDEO: NASA Satellite Transiting Exoplanet Survey began searching for planets around nearby stars, officially starting its scientific operations on July 25, 2018.

(NASA) began its search for planets around nearby stars, officially commencing scientific operations on July 25, 2018.

TESS is expected to transmit its first set of scientific data to Earth in August, then periodically every 13.5 days, once in orbit, as the spacecraft makes the closest approach to the Earth. The TESS science team will begin to search for new planets immediately after the arrival of the first series

"I am delighted that our new mission of planet hunters is ready to explore the neighborhood of our solar system for new worlds, "said Paul Hertz. , Director of NASA's Astrophysics Division at Headquarters, Washington.

"Now that we know that there are more planets than stars in our universe, I look forward to the strange and fantastic worlds we are going to discover."

TESS is NASA's latest satellite to search for planets outside our solar system, known as the exoplanets. The mission will spend the next two years monitoring the closest and brightest stars for periodic dives in their light. These events, called transits, suggest that a planet can pbad in front of its star. TESS should find thousands of planets using this method, some of which could potentially support life.

TESS is an astrophysical exploration mission of NASA led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Mbadachusetts, and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. , Maryland. Dr. George Ricker of the Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT is the principal investigator of the mission. Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Va., Is one of its additional partners; NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mbadachusetts; Lincoln Laboratory of MIT in Lexington, Mbadachusetts; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories around the world participate in the mission.

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