RoundupReads The planet hunter—launching April 16

The planet hunter—launching April 16

2018-03-06
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is targeted to launch no earlier than 5:32 p.m. CST April 16 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The mission will find planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, that periodically block part of the light from their host stars as they pass by, or transit.

TESS will search for thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest and nearest stars outside our solar system during a two-year period of surveying our solar neighborhood. In its mission to identify new worlds, the spacecraft will monitor more than 200,000 stars, looking for a telltale sign: a decrease in a star’s brightness that occurs when an orbiting planet transits between its star and an observing spacecraft, temporarily blocking the star’s light. 

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. George Ricker of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. 

Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participating in the mission.

NASA’s Launch Services Program is responsible for launch management of TESS.

For more information on TESS, go to: https://www.nasa.gov/tess

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is targeted to launch no earlier than April 16, 2018, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellite will find planets outside the solar system that periodically block part of the light from their host stars as they pass by, or transit. Image Credit: Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Meaney
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is targeted to launch no earlier than April 16 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellite will find planets outside the solar system that periodically block part of the light from their host stars as they pass by, or transit. Image Credit: Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Meaney