NASA's new spacecraft officially began searching for distant worlds

After a little over three months in space, NASA 's brand new spacecraft began searching the galaxy for other worlds. The space observatory, dubbed TESS, officially started the scientific operations on July 25, which means the vehicle took pictures of nearby stars with its four cameras to see if planets could hide around them. # 39; them. TESS will send its first observations to Earth in August. It will then continue to send new information periodically for at least the next two years.

On April 18, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched TESS into a super elliptical orbit around Earth, which is its permanent route to search for planets outside our planet. Solar system, or exoplanets. TESS is specifically looking for planets that can exist around the stars closest to Earth, which are only at tens or hundreds of light-years away. TESS will try to find planets that pass "in front" of these stars, periodically decreasing their brightness. The nearby stars are much brighter than the stars that are thousands of light years away, and this will facilitate the study of exoplanets that TESS finds. Researchers will be able to learn more about these exoplanets through follow-up observations, such as their composition and their atmospheres.

the orbit of TESS around the Earth takes 13.7 days to complete, and it brings the vehicle as far than the distance from the moon. During his time away from our planet, he looks at the same sky spots for long periods of time, taking pictures. Then, when TESS approaches the Earth in each orbit, the spacecraft will spend about 16 hours transmitting all this data to huge ground antennas that are part of NASA's Deep Space Network. The plan is to do this routine for each orbit until the end of the mission, scheduled for two years.

However, the TESS orbit type is incredibly stable, allowing the spacecraft to continue to hunt exoplanets well beyond two years. "If you get away from it a bit, the moon tends to send you back into the orbit where you're supposed to be," said Stephen Rinehart, NASA project scientist TESS The Verge in April. about the orbit of TESS. "This orbit could be stable for over 100 years." The scientific routine of TESS can therefore last for many years.