NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite or TESS Spacecraft) has started its hunt for planets orbiting nearby stars. The spacecraft officially began its science operations on July 25, 2018, and will spend the next two years monitoring the nearest and brightest stars.
TESS is expected to transmit whatever science data it has collected back to Earth sometime in August as the spacecraft makes it closest approach to Earth which happens once per orbit and thereafter the data will be transmitted periodically every 13.5 days.
“I’m thrilled that our new planet hunter mission is ready to start scouring our solar system’s neighborhood for new worlds,” said Paul Hertz, NASA Astrophysics division director at Headquarters, Washington.
The TESS Science Team will start crawling the data immediately after its arrival, said NASA. TESS is NASA’s latest satellite designed to search for planets orbiting a star outside our solar system known as exoplanets and will spend two years monitoring the nearest and brightest stars for periodic dips in their light. These events suggest that a planet may be passing in front of a star and are called transits. It is expected that the spacecraft will find thousands of planets using this method until the end of its journey and some of the planets could potentially support life.
“Now that we know there are more planets than stars in our universe, I look forward to the strange, fantastic worlds we’re bound to discover,” Paul added.
To recall, TESS was launched on April 18, 2018, aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and is aimed at finding thousands of exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars. In this process, the spacecraft will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars to search for transiting exoplanets. During these two years, the spacecraft will survey the entire sky by breaking it up into 26 different sectors, each 24 degrees by 96 degrees across.
The spacecraft is fitted with four powerful cameras each having a 16.8-megapixel sensor which cover a square 24-degrees wide, large enough to contain an entire constellation. The four cameras form an observation sector and each observation sector will be watched for about 27 days before rotating to the next. TESS will cover the southern sky in the first year and the north in the remaining time. Because of the overlapping of TESS’s observation sectors, the spacecraft will have an area near the pole under constant observation. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is working together with TESS spacecraft to monitor this region in order to find and study exoplanets.
The spacecraft will study 85 percent of the sky and observe stars that are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed. This will enable far easier follow-up observations with the help of both ground-based and space-based telescopes. TESS is set to cover a sky area 400 times than that surveyed by Kepler.
NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission, TESS, is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.