NASA’s Exoplanet Hunt TESS space telescope is done with her primary mission, but her search for strange new worlds continues.
TESS (short for “Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite”) embarked on its two-year primary mission on July 4, after 66 confirmed discoveries alien planet and nearly 2,100 “candidates” that scientists have yet to veteran, NASA officials said.
TESS, however, continues to study the heavens on an extended mission that runs through September 2022.
Related: NASA’s TESS exoplanet hunting mission in photos
“TESS produces a torrent of high-quality observations that provide valuable data on a wide range of scientific topics,” said Patricia Boyd, TESS’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. said in a statement. “While embarking on its extended mission, TESS is already a rare success.”
TESS launched Earth in April 2018 and began its scientific work three months later. The probe hunts for foreign worlds with the “transfer method, “monitoring stars for thin brightness dips caused by surrounding worlds skipping their faces.
This same strategy was used to great effect by the predecessor of TESS, the pioneering work of NASA Kepler space telescope. Kepler, which was declared dead in October 2018, found about two-thirds of the 4,200 exoplanets discovered so far. (Kepler findings are still rolling in; scientists continue to speculate about the spacecraft’s enormous dataset, which has more than 3,000 additional candidates in need of further analysis.)
TESS uses four cameras to study sectors of the sky 24 to 96 degrees for about one month at a time. (Your clenched fist held at arm’s length occupies about 10 degrees of air, for reference.) The probe brought the first year of its primary mission to sectors in the southern air, and then shot in the second year to the northern loft.
The planetary yacht managed to cover 75% of the sky during its two-year primary mission, NASA officials said.
The extended mission will have the same order, with TESS focusing on the southern air for the first 12 months before moving to the northern air. In that second year, the probe will also observe areas around the ecliptic, the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
TESS’s primary mission yielded many exciting discoveries, including an Earth-sized planet named TOI 700 d that revolves in the buildable zone of its star, the range of distances at which liquid water could be stable on a world surface. But the expanded mission could be even more fruitful, as the TESS team has made some improvements over the past two years.
The probe’s cameras now capture a full image every 10 minutes, three times faster than during the primary mission, “NASA officials wrote in the same statement.” A new fast mode allows the brightness of thousands of stars to be measured every 20 seconds, along with the previous method of collecting these observations of tens of thousands of stars every two minutes. ”
The budget for TESS’s primary mission was limited to $ 200 million, not including launch costs, which added another $ 87 million. The extended mission will not add too much to the overall price tag. For example, the extended mission operations of NASA’s New Horizons Pluto probe, which began in 2017, have cost less than $ 15 million per year, on top of a premium mission prize range of about $ 780 million.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
