NASA's newest planet hunter was launched Wednesday evening on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket.
At the moment the spacecraft lifted off, astronomers knew of nearly 4,000 alien worlds outside our solar system. During the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite's planned two-year mission, scientists expect, it will increase that number by a factor of five. Among the new discoveries, they hope, will be a rocky world with an atmosphere that can be probed for signs of life.
"This is opening an entirely new window on the universe," said MIT astrophysicist George Ricker, the principal investigator for the mission.
TESS should arrive in orbit around Earth - on a never-before-used, highly elliptical path that takes it close to the moon - about two months after launch. It will begin science operations shortly after that.
"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.
Unlike Kepler, which peered deep into a narrow stretch of sky to find faraway planets around stars like the sun, TESS's survey will be "wide and shallow," Ricker explained. It is designed to look stars of all ages and sizes within a few hundred light-years of Earth, and it will be able to canvass the entire sky in just two years.
Next, astronomers on Earth will measure the way the planet's gravity makes the star wobble as it orbits - an observation that will provide the planet's mass. Combined, those data will help scientists characterize the planet: Is it a small, rocky world like Earth? Is it light and water-rich? Does it have a solid surface, or does it resemble Neptune, with a dense core surrounded by swirling clouds of gas?
"This is the reason we're all so excited," said Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at Caltech and NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute who sits on the steering committee for TESS's follow-up working group. Unlike Kepler's discoveries, the planets found by TESS will orbit stars nearby and bright enough to allow for detailed characterization.
It is unlikely that JWST or any other existing telescope would be capable of detecting biosignatures on an exoplanet as small as Earth. For that, astronomers must await missions that are still in their concept phase and will not launch for nearly two decades.
"We can start to find out, how does planet occurrence vary as a function of the type of star and the age of the star?" Christiansen said. "We can resolve competing theories about how planets form."
Beyond planets, the spacecraft will also have its shutters open for other serendipitous, short-term events, such as supernovas, gamma ray bursts, or gravitational wave-generating neutron star collisions like the one that made headlines last fall.
"TESS is very much a trash-treasure sort of mission," said Natalia Guerrero, deputy manager for the TESS Objects of Interest team. Looking at light from across the whole sky, she said, it will inevitably find something to satisfy almost everyone in the astronomy community.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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