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NASA launched in April this year its exoplanet survey satellite, or simply TESS, to replace the endangered Kepler K2 spacecraft and examine more than 2,000 exoplanets found by Kepler K2 missions. A few months on mission, the TESS has already found a comet and a panoply of asteroids, but that's not all. He found two exoplanets recently confirmed by the researchers.
According to the statement issued by NASA and the MIT astrophysicist team, there are many planets in the night sky waiting to be found. It's only a matter of time until TESS finds all of this and indeed, he started to cross the cosmos by scanning 400 times more sky than Kepler K2's or any other mission.
About the discovery, TESS found two exoplanets revolving around their host star. The largest is called Pi Mensae C and is about 60 light-years away. It is located in the constellation Mensa and revolves around its star host, 6.3 days thanks to its remoteness and its status of "super-earth" because it is twice as large as our planet. Another star discovered by the TESS has been named LHS 3844, a hot land located nearly 49 light-years away. It revolves around its host every 11 hours, as confirmed by the team on Thursday.
In addition, the extreme size and mass of the Pi Mensae C, as well as its composition, could mean that it is not a livable planet, as researchers think it could be a aquatic world with the atmosphere of the water vapor. On the other hand, the LHS 3844B is a hot earth planet, which means it is warmer than Earth and probably not a good choice for humans and therefore uninhabitable.
The TESS is a massive $ 337 million mission over two years. It is equipped with sophisticated instruments allowing it to find exoplanets, host stars and to follow its progress and other parameters. It uses the transit photometry method used by its predecessor, the Kepler K2 mission, for more than 20 years, while scanning the sky cover more than 400 times. TESS will continually find and examine exoplanets in the future to find habitual candidates where life could evolve.
Kepler has been able to find more than 3,700 exoplanets and he is currently on his next observational campaign or until he runs out of fuel, which will not take much time since reports indicating that his tank was almost empty were presented a few weeks earlier. he sent data from his last observation campaign last month. TESS was designed to replace Kepler K2 thanks to its four special cameras and the use of a sophisticated detection mode of photometry emission that allows it to detect hollows and save the potential existence of exoplanets passing in front of the host stars.
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