TESS: Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
Description
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an Explorer-class planet finder. In the first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey, TESS will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, orbiting a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances. The principal goal of the TESS mission is to detect small planets with bright host stars in the solar neighborhood, so that detailed characterizations of the planets and their atmospheres can be performed. TESS will monitor the brightnesses of more than 500,000 stars during a two year mission, searching for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Transits occur when a planet’s orbit carries it directly in front of its parent star as viewed from Earth. TESS is expected to catalog more than 3000 transiting exoplanet candidates, including a sample of ~500 Earth-sized and ‘Super Earth’ planets, with radii less than twice that of the Earth. TESS will detect small rock-and-ice planets orbiting a diverse range of stellar types and covering a wide span of orbital periods, including rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars. TESS stars will be 30-100 times brighter than those surveyed by the Keplersatellite; thus,TESS planets should be far easier to characterize with follow-up observations. These follow-up observations will provide refined measurements of the planet masses, sizes, densities, and atmospheric properties. TESS will provide prime targets for further, more detailed characterization with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as well as other large ground-based and space-based telescopes of the future. TESS's legacy will be a catalog of the nearest and brightest stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which will comprise the most favorable targets for detailed investigations in the coming decades. TESS team partners include the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) and MIT Lincoln Laboratory; NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center; Orbital Sciences Corporation; NASA’s Ames Research Center; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; the Aerospace Corporation; and the Space Telescope Science Institute. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. Source: http://space.mit.edu/TESS/TESS/TESS_Overview.html |
Links
http://space.mit.edu/TESS/TESS/TESS_Overview.html Facts Spectrum Studied: Visible Launch Date: Projected 2017 Status: On track Orbital Location: Earth orbit (108,000 to 373,000 km) Launch Vehicle: Unknown Launch Site: Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida Mass: Unknown kg Funding Agency Massachusetts Institute of Technology Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics NASA Ames Research Center Kavli Foundation Smithsonian Institution |