NASA's New Planet Hunter begins its quest for extraterrestrial worlds

NASA's New Global Hunting Telescope is Officially Operational

The Exoplanets of Transit Survey Satellite (TESS), designed to search for extraterrestrial worlds around stars near the sun, began collecting scientific data Wednesday, July 25. Members of the instrumentation team announced yesterday (July 27).

TESS will send these initial data to Earth in August, with new observations arriving every 13.5 days afterwards, mission team members said in a statement. I am delighted that our planet hunter is ready to start combing the backyard of our solar system for new worlds, "said Paul Hertz, NASA Astrophysics Division Director, in a statement. With perhaps more planets than stars in our universe, I look forward to the strange and fantastic worlds we are going to discover. "

TESS began April 18 orbiting the Earth After a trial period, the instrument was ready to use, and sent its first photograph, a test image, to its managers in May, which showed 200,000 individual stars, many of which could be accompanied by photos. At least one planet.

TESS follows in the footsteps of NASA's iconic Kepler telescope, which, during two missions, has identified 2,650 confirmed exoplanets, according to the agency's space.As Kepler, TESS will look for minu hollow sculpts in the brightness of individual stars caused by a planet passing between its star and the telescope in its orbit.

But while Kepler was limited to scrutinizing a small patch of sky during his main mission TESS will study almost all of the sky in his two years of planned observations. During this investigation, he will focus on the 200,000 brightest stars in the sky – which means that the project should identify the planets around many stars that sky observers know and love.

The team that designed TESS calculated 1600 new exoplanets, some of which are the size of Earth

Some TESS planets will likely become targets for tracking by the much delayed James Webb Space Telescope of the NASA, who will be able to study the atmospheres of these planets and start characterizing them in more detail than what TESS can handle.

Send an email to Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her @meghanbartels . Follow us on @Spacedotcom Facebook and Google+ . Original article on Space.com .