NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite or better known as TESS, officially began its scientific operations on July 25, 2018. TESS has started to explore nearby stars in search for planets. TESS will be transmitting the scientific data that it will be collecting back to Earth somewhere in August.
TESS will be looking at each observation sector for at least a period of 27 days, and then it will rotate on to the next sector. It will first cover the southern hemisphere and then move on to the northern hemisphere and its goal will be to build a map of 85 percent of our sky.
According to the TESS Science team, they expect TESS to send the data it will be collecting back to Earth in August, and then periodically after every 13.5 days, one for each orbit, when the spacecraft will be making its closest approach to Earth. The science team is ready to analyse the data and would start looking for new planets as soon as the first series of data is transmitted.
Paul Hertz, the NASA Astrophysics division director at the Headquarters in Washington, said, “I’m thrilled that our new planet hunter mission is ready to start scouring our solar system’s neighborhood for new worlds. Now that we know there are more planets than stars in our universe, I look forward to the strange, fantastic worlds we’re bound to discover.”
TESS is the latest spacecraft launched by NASA to look for exoplanets, which are planets that exist outside the solar system. For the next two years, TESS will be monitoring many of the nearest and brightest of the stars and analyzing their periodic dips of light. These periodic dips are called transits. Transits can provide information on when a planet might be passing in front of its star. Using this method TESS might find thousands of new planets that we don’t know of, some of which are predicted to support life.
The TESS NASA mission is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is being managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The principal investigator of the mission is Dr. George Ricker from MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.