TESS shares its first scientific image in the hunt to find new worlds

NASA's newest planetary hunter, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), now provides valuable data to help scientists discover and investigate exciting new exoplanets or planets beyond our solar system. Part of the data from TESS's initial scientific orbit includes a detailed image of the southern sky taken with the four wide-field spacecraft cameras. This scientific "first light" image captures a multitude of stars and other objects, including systems known to have exoplanets.

"In an ocean of stars bursting with new worlds, TESS is launching a vast network of promising planets for further study," said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA headquarters in Washington. . "This first light science image shows the capabilities of the TESS cameras and shows that the mission will realize its incredible potential in our search for another Earth."

TESS acquired the image using the four cameras for a period of 30 minutes on Tuesday, August 7th. The black lines on the image are spaces between the camera detectors. The images include parts of a dozen constellations, from Capricornus to Pictor, and two large and small magellanic clouds, the closest galaxies to ours. The small bright dot above the small Magellanic cloud is a globular cluster – a spherical collection of hundreds of thousands of stars – called NGC 104, also known as 47 Tucanae because of its location in the constellation south Toucana, the Toucan. Two stars, Beta Gruis and R Doradus, are so bright that they saturate an entire column of pixels on the detectors of the second and fourth TESS cameras, creating long spikes of light.

"This part of the southern hemisphere of the sky includes more than a dozen stars that we know have planets based on studies by terrestrial observatories," said George Ricker, Principal Investigator at the Institute. Kavli of Astrophysics and Space of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Research in Cambridge.

TESS cameras, designed and built by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass., And the MIT Kavli Institute, monitor large areas of the sky in search of transits. The transits occur when a planet passes in front of its star seen from the perspective of the satellite, causing a steady drop in the brightness of the star.

TESS will spend two years monitoring 26 of these areas for 27 days each, covering 85% of the sky. During its first year of operation, the satellite will study the 13 sectors making up the southern sky. Then, TESS will turn to the 13 sectors of the northern sky to conduct a two-year survey.

MIT is coordinating with Northrop Grumman in Falls Church, Virginia, to schedule scientific observations. TESS transmits images every 13.7 days, whenever it oscillates closest to the Earth. NASA's Deep Space Network receives and transmits data to MIT's TESS payload center for initial assessment and analysis. Comprehensive data processing and analysis takes place in the NASA Ames Research Center's Science Processing and Operations Center pipeline in Silicon Valley, California, which provides calibrated images and refined light curves.

TESS builds on the legacy of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which also uses transits to find exoplanets. TESS target stars are 30 to 300 light-years distant and about 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler targets, which are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. The brilliance of TESS targets makes them ideal candidates for follow-up studies by spectroscopy, studying the interaction of matter and light.

The James Webb Space Telescope and other space and ground observatories will use spectroscopy to learn about the planets discovered by TESS, including their atmospheric compositions, their masses and their densities.

TESS has also launched comments requested under the TESS Guest Investigator program, which allows the scientific community to carry out research on the satellite.

"We have been very pleased with the number of guest investigator proposals and have selected competitive programs for a wide range of scientific studies, from the study of remote active galaxies to asteroids in our own solar system," Padi said. Boyd, TESS project scientist. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "And of course, many exoplanet proposals and exciting stars.The scientific community is eager to see the incredible data that TESS will produce and the exciting scientific discoveries for the exoplanets and beyond."

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