NASA's TESS spacecraft begins its planetary hunting operation



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Almost three months after its launch in space on April 18, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (TESS) began its search for new planets, marking the official start of operations on July 25th. the US space agency has announced. TESS is expected to transmit its first set of data to Earth in August, and thereafter it will periodically send the data every 13.5 days – once per orbit. According to NASA, the TESS science team will start scouring the data for new planets as soon as the first set of information arrives on Earth.

"I am delighted that our new planet hunter mission is ready to start scouring the neighborhood of our solar system for new worlds.Now that we know that there are more planets than there are. stars in our universe, I look forward to the weird and fantastic worlds we are going to discover, "said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division at Washington headquarters.

The motive for the mission

TESS is NASA's last satellite to search for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. The mission will spend the next two years, (elapsed: 3 months, 10 days) monitoring the brightness of more than 200,000 nearest and brightest stars for periodic dives in their light. These events, called planetary 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, NASA said. The spacecraft will occupy an orbit never used above the Earth that takes half of the orbital period of the moon and will study more than 90% of the sky. In addition, TESS will focus on stars 30 to 100 times brighter than those studied by Kepler. It will also pave the way for new observations with NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.

"The TESS is a space telescope for NASA's Explorers program, designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler mission.The TESS will discover thousands Exoplanets orbiting the brightest stars in the sky.This first-ever satellite-based space survey will identify planets ranging from terrestrial giants to gbady giants, around a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances.No ground study can achieve this feat, "NASA said in a statement.

TESS is expected to catalog more than 1,500 exoplanet candidates in transit, including a sample of about 500 planets the size of an Earth and Super Earth, with radii inferior to twice those of the Earth. TESS will detect small rocky planets and ice orbiting a diverse range of stellar types and covering a broad period of orbital periods, including rocky worlds in habitable areas of their host stars.

History of the Mission

TESS is an astrophysical exploration mission of NASA led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Mbadachusetts, and managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center of the NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland. TESS, which was approved in 2013 as a Medium Explorer mission, has a cost of only $ 200 million (plus $ 87 million for launch), which is significantly less than Kepler's $ 640 million at launch. . He was shot in the night sky on the Falcon 9 Full Thrust rocket (B1045.1) from the SpaceX Launch Complex 40 launch pad.

Cover photo caption: Illustration of a satellite artist transiting Exoplanet Survey. Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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