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The Launch of a Planet Hunter

Perhaps as early as next month, the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) will be launched into orbit. TESS is a successor to the highly productive Kepler mission, which discovered thousands of exoplanet candidates during its years of operation. Kepler was designed to stare at a fixed portion of the sky to look for transits of planets as they traverse the face of their star's disk. However, the field of view of its instruments was only one quarter of one percent - or 1/400th - of the sky. TESS will be able to survey the entire sky with comparable resolution. Its specific mission is to examine nearby stars and to obtain candidates for further examination by ground-based observatories and the James Webb Space Telescope once that instrument is launched in 2019.

During its two-year mission, TESS will examine about 500,000 nearby sun-like stars. It is expected that the mission will find more than 3000 transiting exoplanet candidates. Of those, an estimated 20 could be super-Earths located in their stars habitable zone - worlds ripe for further investigation.

TESS is scheduled for launch this spring, aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. TESS team partners include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Orbital ATK, NASA's Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.