If all goes as planned, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite should lift off Wednesday as early as 3:51 p.m. PDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It will survey a swathe of stars, hoping to detect worlds that might be capable of harboring life.
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Once Tess has discovered the planets, strong telescopes will be used to learn more about them, looking for signs such as oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide and water vapour.
Made by Orbital ATK, known for both its aerospace as well as defense tech, TESS launched aboard SpaceX’s most famous rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
SpaceX has re-flown 11 of these first stages to date, but the tally didn’t increase today: This Falcon 9 was brand-new.
SpaceX has launched NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), that is created to look for exoplanets and alien worlds after delays pushed the initial launch date by two days.
SpaceX employees had another reason to celebrate: The first-stage booster rocket landed on an ocean platform following liftoff, to be recycled for a future NASA mission.
TESS, NASA’s new telescope will not be powerful enough to take a closer look, but that’s normal, its mission is quite different. But there are some big differences between the missions.
“Kepler broke open the field in a rather dramatic way”, Ricker said – demonstrating that for every star in the sky, there are untold numbers of exoplanets waiting to be found.
“TESS is doing a survey of stars which can be easily followed up by ground-based and space telescopes, sweeping across 85% of the sky in just two years”. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, once launched in 2020 or so, will probe these planets’ atmospheres for potential traces of life.
On March 30, a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket successfully launched 10 next-generation satellites out of California.
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. “We’ve been working hand-in-hand with SpaceX to get to the certification to be able to fly the type of mission that TESS is”, said Omar Baez, launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program, at the pre-launch briefing. “That’s one thing that I think will be a lasting legacy of TESS”.
At 13.7 days, TESS’ orbit is exactly half of the Moon’s, which lets the Moon stabilize it.
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ORBIT: Tess will aim for a unique elongated orbit that passes within 45,000 miles of Earth on one end and as far away as the orbit of the moon on the other end. NASA’s goal is to use TESS to look for more rocky, Earth-like habitable worlds in Goldilocks zones, after all, that are relatively close to our own.
