April 18, 2018 SpaceX has successfully launched NASA’s new planet-hunting satellite named TESS on Wednesday night. This successful deployment has delighted scientists and space fans who hope the spacecraft will discover many new planets around new single star systems, as well as binary and trinary star systems. For a triple play SpaceX landed the first-stage booster successfully at sea, this was the space company’s 24th such recovery. TESS launched on the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. TESS being an acronym for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is a telescope and precision camera array that will hunt for new worlds around nearby stars.
TESS will provide new targets to where future studies will analyze each new planetary system found for the ability of harboring life NASA says. Shortly after TESS launched into space it successfully deployed its solar arrays. It will spend the next 60 days getting to its proper orbit. NASA and SpaceX crews cheered each stage of the process and at one hour and nine minutes after launch, it was announced that the satellite was functioning correctly. NASA tweeted that the deployment happened right on schedule and the solar arrays will “give the spacecraft the power it needs to search for worlds beyond our solar system.”
With a gravitational assist from the moon, the spacecraft will soon settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth. This orbit is carefully planned to account for the moon’s gravity. The spacecraft will be looking for something known as a transit. A transit is when a planet passes in front of its star causing a periodic dip in the star’s brightness. NASA’s first history making transit survey telescope named Kepler used the same transit detection method. TESS is designed to concentrate on stars less than 300 light-years away in our own milky way galaxy, about 200,000 of them. Additionally, NASA says the satellite will begin its initial two year mission 60 days after launch, following successful testing of its instruments. Four wide-field cameras will give TESS a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of our entire sky.
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission that is led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. Orbital ATK manufactured and designed the new satellite. SpaceX’s Vice President for Mission Assurance Hans Koenigsmann said previously that the second stage rocket carrying TESS would not be recovered. He also stated there is something new happening with this mission, SpaceX plans to fire the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket and kick it out of orbit so that it doesn’t become space trash. This united effort will illuminate our view of local star and planetary systems as never before.
Citizen Scientists are encourage to volunteer at planethunters.org to begin learning how to classify planetary systems.
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