There’s a great world next door. Let’s go.
The search for alien worlds and perhaps alien life will take another step outward on Monday when TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is launched into orbit around the Earth. TESS will spend at least two years scrutinizing the entire sky for exoplanets — planets around other stars — within about 300 light years from here. The worlds next door.
When is the launch and how can I watch it?
The launch is presently scheduled for 6:32.07 p.m. EDT on Monday. It can viewed on NASA’s website nasa.gov/live, with live coverage scheduled to begin at 6 p.m.
SpaceX, whose rocket will carry TESS into space, anticipated favorable weather conditions for the launch.
Falcon 9 and @NASA_TESS are vertical on Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Weather is 80% favorable for today’s launch at 6:32 p.m. EDT, 22:32 UTC. pic.twitter.com/eEgVxT24No— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 16, 2018
Why is the TESS mission important?
Over the last 30 years, astronomers on Earth and in space, using instruments like the Kepler spacecraft, have discovered 4,000 exoplanets, most of them far, far away. The galaxy, they now think, has more planets than stars in it. TESS will find the closest of these planets to Earth, pinpointing targets for the next generation of telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope, in space to study for clues to their habitability or even inhabitants.
TESS is sponsored by NASA, as part of its small Astrophysics Explorer missions. The spacecraft was designed by a collaboration led by George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and built by Orbital ATK of Dulles, Va. It will be launched in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
How does TESS work?
The spacecraft has four cameras, which will check the brightness of some 200,000 stars every two minutes, looking for slight dips that could be a planet eclipsing its home star.
The spacecraft will divide each hemisphere of the heavens into 13 slices and stare at each segment for 27 days at a time, stepping around the sky in two years. Astronomers expect TESS to find some 20,000 exoplanets and as many as 500 that are roughly the size of Earth.
Where will it go?
TESS will be launched into an unusual egg-shaped orbit that takes it as far out as the moon every 13.7 days and then back down to 67,000 miles altitude, from where it will transmit data.
What is the role of SpaceX?
SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, has launched a series of successful cargo missions to the Space Station along with the occasional failure. In February it launched a Tesla convertible into orbit around the sun with its new powerful Falcon Heavy. This is the first time that NASA has directly commissioned the company to launch one of its scientific satellites.
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