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The alien hunting TESS telescope is your new favorite NASA mission


On April 16, NASA's latest and greatest mission is set to launch to space. The new space telescope is named TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and it has a pretty awesome job. TESS is going on a hunt for alien planets. 

The new mission, which is more than 10 years in the making, could mark our first step toward discovering another planet outside of our solar system that harbors life.

Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist, said, TESS is opening a door for a whole new kind of study. We’re going to be able study individual planets and start talking about the differences between planets. The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come. It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research.

Unlike other exoplanet-hunting spacecraft, TESS is perfectly equipped to locate Earth sized planets circling stars in the habitable zone, the part of a star's orbit where liquid water could be sustained on a planet's surface. If a planet the size of Earth is in a star's habitable zone, it's at least theoretically possible that the planet could sustain life. TESS is designed to hunt for these worlds around bright, relatively nearby stars, according to NASA. The satellite will spend about two years surveying the sky for signs of planets ranging in size from about Jupiter to Earth. 

Elisa Quintana, a NASA astrophysicist, said in a video about the mission, it's going to help us answer a really important question, and that is is, 'Which of our nearest stellar neighbors has planets?

The satellite will find these worlds by searching for small dips in the brightness of a star that are created when a planet passes between or transits, its host star and the telescope. Those transits allow scientists to figure out the size of a planet, learn more about its atmosphere, and even characterize its orbit.

TESS will help build upon the legacy of the Kepler Space Telescope, another exoplanet hunting satellite using the same transit method that's still in space today. The Kepler changed our understanding of the galaxy by spotting 2,600 confirmed exoplanets orbiting stars up to 3,000 light-years away.

Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director said, we learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars.

While Kepler's main mission was to stare deeply into one part of the sky, keeping an eye out for worlds circling distant stars, TESS will survey a large part of the sky, with a particular focus on nearby, bright stars.

Data gathered by TESS will also be used to help with the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) mission, when it hopefully launches to space in 2020.The JWST, which is known as the Hubble Space Telescope's successor, will be able to peer into the atmospheres of exoplanets, figuring out if the worlds could be habitable.
 
MIT exoplanet hunter Sara Seager said via email, we plan to followup atmospheres with JWST and we have the capability to find water vapor and signs of life by way of gases that don’t belong that might be attributed to life.

TESS is a particularly exciting moment for exoplanet scientists today, but hopefully the public will want to get involved as well. 

Seager said, planet finding never gets old. I hope the public will joyfully share in discoveries.


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