Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

• TESS, NASA’s planet-hunting satellite was recently launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

About TESS mission:

• This mission will catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets.
• Of these, approximately 300 are expected to be Earth-sized and super-Earth-sized exoplanets, which are worlds no larger than twice the size of Earth.
• TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting our nearest and brightest stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies.
• It will look for dips in the visible light of stars, which requires that planets cross stars in our line of sight.
• Repetitive, periodic dips can reveal a planet or planets orbiting a star. Transit photometry, which looks at how much light an object puts out at any given time, can tell researchers a lot about a planet
• This mission will survey the entire sky over a period of two years. The satellite will do this by breaking it up into 26 different sectors and the cameras on the satellite will survey each sector for 27 days.

By: Vishal