NASA successfully launches planet-hunter satellite ‘Tess’ on SpaceX rocket

But TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is created to identify thousands more, opening our eyes even further to the diversity of worlds in our universe.

The NASA satellite known as TESS is heading towards its proper orbit where it will begin its quest to find new planets and contribute to the search for alien life.

TESS’s predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, turned exoplanets from a rarity into something practically commonplace.

NASA’s exoplanet hunter, similarly like Kepler, is going to hunt planets with the potential for supporting life with the “transit method”, which means scientists will spot when those planets cross the face of their parent stars. The moon’s gravity will help get the satellite in the right orbit and keep it there.

For such a large undertaking, Tess is surprisingly compact and its mission relatively low-cost at $337 million.

TESS separated from the Falcon’s second stage less than an hour after lift-off and anxious boffins at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center were relieved to see the solar arrays of the spacecraft deploy and telemetry make its way to the ground stations. “Once we’re in orbit, we can survive for decades without any additional propulsion”.

At 18:51 local time (2251 GMT), the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, started its journey into space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

Scientists divided the sky into 26 sectors for the two-year mission.

The telescope can do this by combining wide-field optics and an efficient search pattern. This broad view will allow TESS to study about 20 million stars, according to Dr. George Ricker, the mission’s principal investigator and a scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the first year of operation, the telescope will observe the sky of the southern hemisphere, while in the second year of the northern hemisphere, so as to cover over 85% of the sky. Tess will be looking at stars that are between 30 and 300 light years away and up to 100 times brighter than what Kepler was staring at. “A few months after TESS launches, we will be able to point out the first ones of these familiar stars, which host planets that could be like ours”, says Cornell University’s Lisa Kaltenegger. Powerful telescopes such as Hubble and NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2020, will also study the planetary atmospheres in detail.

“The types of planets that Tess will detect are revealed by a process called a transit”.

It hopes to find rocky and icy planets, hot gas giants and, possibly, water worlds.