NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was delivered to space Wednesday, April 18, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch occurred right on time at 6:51 p.m. EDT following an uneventful countdown highlighted by excellent weather and healthy hardware. At 7:53 p.m. EDT, the twin solar arrays that will power the spacecraft successfully deployed.
At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with TESS lifts off at 6:51 p.m. EDT. Image credit: NASA.
“Liftoff of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying TESS, a planet-hunting spacecraft that will search for new worlds beyond our Solar System,” NASA launch commentator Josh Finch said as the rocket thundered away from the launch complex.
“Wow, are we excited. We just had a perfect countdown and perfect launch of the TESS mission. The Falcon 9 continues to demonstrate what a reliable vehicle it has become,” said Tim Dunn of NASA’s Launch Services Program.
“We are thrilled TESS is on its way to help us discover worlds we have yet to imagine, worlds that could possibly be habitable, or harbor life. With missions like the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope to help us study the details of these planets, we are ever the closer to discovering whether we are alone in the Universe,” added Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Over the course of several weeks, TESS will use six thruster burns to travel in a series of progressively elongated orbits to reach the Moon, which will provide a gravitational assist so that TESS can transfer into its 13.7-day final science orbit around Earth. After approximately 60 days of check-out and instrument testing, the telescope will begin its work.
“One critical piece for the science return of TESS is the high data rate associated with its orbit. Each time the spacecraft passes close to Earth, it will transmit full-frame images taken with the cameras. That’s one of the unique things TESS brings that was not possible before,” said TESS principal investigator Dr. George Ricker, of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
TESS will be the first space-based, all-sky surveyor to search for exoplanets.
For its planned two-year mission, astronomers divided the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will use four unique wide-field cameras to map 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky during its first year of observations and 13 sectors of the northern sky during the second year, altogether covering 85% of the sky.
TESS will be watching for phenomena called transits. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its star from the observer’s perspective, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. More than 78% of the approximately 3,700 confirmed exoplanets have been found using transits.
NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope found more than 2,600 exoplanets, most orbiting faint stars between 300 and 3,000 light-years from Earth, using this same method of watching for transits. TESS will focus on stars between 30 and 300 light-years away and 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets.
The brightness of these target stars will allow astronomers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planets’ capacity to harbor life.
“The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come. It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research,” said Dr. Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Illustration of NASA’s TESS spacecraft observing an M-dwarf star with orbiting planets. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
According to NASA, TESS will collect 27 gigabytes per day in its all-sky search for undiscovered planets orbiting 200,000 stars.
One of the first steps in the data’s journey from deep space to a scientist’s laptop is the Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC) at NASA’s Ames Research Center, the design of which is based on the Kepler mission’s Science Operations Center (SOC).
NASA Ames’ Pleiades supercomputer, one of the most powerful systems in the world, has the power to process TESS’s biweekly data deluge of almost 10 billion pixels in three to five days, a cadence that enables SPOC to keep up with the volume of incoming data.
TESS’s first public release of processed data is planned for the beginning of 2019.
