{"id":13853,"date":"2018-04-20T01:17:06","date_gmt":"2018-04-19T17:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/all-sky-surveyor-launched-from-cape-canaveral-on-the-hunt-for-exoplanets\/"},"modified":"2018-04-20T01:17:06","modified_gmt":"2018-04-19T17:17:06","slug":"all-sky-surveyor-launched-from-cape-canaveral-on-the-hunt-for-exoplanets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/all-sky-surveyor-launched-from-cape-canaveral-on-the-hunt-for-exoplanets\/","title":{"rendered":"All-sky surveyor launched from Cape Canaveral on the hunt for exoplanets"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT) with NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: Walter Scriptunas II\/Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, built to find planets around other stars that are close enough for detailed follow-ups by future telescopes, launched Wednesday into a unique high-altitude orbit on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.<\/p>\n

The $337 million mission is the latest in a line of space-based observatories designed for exoplanet research, building on discoveries made by NASA\u2019s Kepler telescope and laying the foundation for missions set for launch over the next decade.<\/p>\n

TESS lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral\u2019s Complex 40 launch pad at 6:51:30 p.m. EDT (2251:30 GMT) Wednesday, heading for an arcing elliptical orbit that will take the spacecraft more than two-thirds the distance to the moon.<\/p>\n

The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket thundered into a clear evening sky over Florida\u2019s Space Coast with 1.7 million pounds of thrust, departing to the east over the Atlantic Ocean, where the launcher\u2019s first stage descended to a SpaceX landing platform parked a few hundred miles east of Cape Canaveral.<\/p>\n

While the first stage made its away back to Earth for refurbishment and reuse \u2014 potentially in late June on SpaceX\u2019s next space station resupply flight \u2014 the Falcon 9\u2019s second stage engine drove the 798-pound (362-kilogram) TESS spacecraft into a transfer orbit that was targeted to range from a low point of 154 miles (248 kilometers) as far as 168,000 miles (270,000 kilometers) from Earth at its highest point.<\/p>\n

SpaceX and NASA officials said the Falcon 9 rocket achieved an on-target orbit before deploying TESS less than 50 minutes after liftoff, while the spacecraft soared over the Indian Ocean west of Australia.<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, engineers confirmed TESS extended its power-generating solar panels to a span of 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) tip-to-tip. The satellite started charging its batteries as designed, while ground controllers at Orbital ATK, which built the TESS spacecraft, ran it through a post-launch health check.<\/p>\n

Officials said TESS was performing as expected late Wednesday evening.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington. \u201cWith missions like the 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral\u2019s Complex 40 launch pad with NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: SpaceX<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After a five-day checkout of the spacecraft, ground controllers will kick off procedures to switch on TESS\u2019s cameras, with \u201cfirst light\u201d from the observatory expected next week.<\/p>\n

TESS will scan around 85 percent of the sky during its two-year mission, and astronomers predict the mission could detect as many as 20,000 undiscovered planets lurking around stars in our solar neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Carrying four 16.8-megapixel cameras, TESS will look for dips in light coming from some 200,000 relatively bright, pre-selected nearby stars. The periodic blots, if found to occur in a repeating pattern, are a tell-tale sign of a planet transiting between its host star and the telescope.<\/p>\n

The craft\u2019s four imaging cameras each cover a square in the sky that measures 24 by 24 degrees, wide enough to fit the constellation Orion into the field of view of a single camera. The cameras together will simultaneously survey a 24-degree by 96-degree strip of the sky for 27 days, then move on to stare at another sector of the sky.<\/p>\n

TESS will search for exoplanets from a unique orbit in a 2:1 resonance with the moon, following a loop that takes it as close as 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) from Earth, and farther than the moon at its most distant point.<\/p>\n

Such an orbit has three key advantages: It\u2019s stable, using lunar gravity to maintain its shape without the need for maneuvers; It passes close enough to Earth to transmit full frame images through a high-speed Ka-band downlink; It keeps TESS away from the damaging effects of the Van Allen radiation belts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe orbit takes 13.7 days to go around once, so we do actually two orbits for every lunar orbit,\u201d said Padi Boyd, an astrophysicist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center who serves as TESS\u2019s deputy project scientist. \u201cIt swings out very far past the moon at its farthest point, then when it comes back in towards the Earth it\u2019s going very quickly and that\u2019s when it dumps the data.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we\u2019re only going to get one data dump every 13.7 days, and then it takes a tremendous software effort to analyze those images and look for these transit signals,\u201d Boyd told CBS News in an interview.<\/p>\n

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An illustration of the phasing orbits to be employed by TESS on the way to its final science orbit, labeled P\/2 in this image. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the stability of the mission\u2019s final science orbit, TESS has enough fuel to keep up its exoplanet hunt for as long as 20 or 30 years, assuming NASA funding and spacecraft components remain robust.<\/p>\n

Reaching TESS\u2019s unique observing orbit, known as a P\/2 orbit, requires time and finesse.<\/p>\n

The compact spacecraft\u2019s on-board propulsion system will raise TESS\u2019s orbit in the coming weeks to set up for a flyby of the moon May 17.<\/p>\n

TESS will slingshot by the moon at a distance of around 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers), using gravity to reshape its orbit, increasing the satellite\u2019s orbital perigee, or low point, to the final planned altitude of around 67,000 miles. After the lunar flyby, the high point of the satellite\u2019s elongated orbit will stretch well beyond the moon, and another thruster firing will nudge TESS into its final science orbit in mid-June.<\/p>\n

The collection of science data is scheduled to begin in July, with the first year of TESS\u2019s two-year campaign aimed at stars in the southern sky. In 2019, TESS will start looking at stars in the northern sky.<\/p>\n

George Ricker, who leads the TESS science team at MIT\u2019s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said the exoplanet surveyor is a \u201cfinder scope\u201d for the Webb telescope and huge ground-based observatories.<\/p>\n

TESS will primarily look at M-dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than the sun, and make up the majority of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Also called red dwarfs, the stars that are TESS\u2019s focus have not been thoroughly investigated to determine whether they harbor their own solar systems.<\/p>\n

The observatory\u2019s wide-angle cameras are only about 4 inches (10 centimeters) in size, giving TESS a tiny fraction of the light-collecting power of a telescope like Webb, which is scheduled for launch in 2020 with a 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror.<\/p>\n

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A view of NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite before launch. The observatory\u2019s four cameras are located at the top of the spacecraft. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The planets found by TESS will be prime candidates for further study by JWST because they will be relatively nearby. The bulk of the more than 2,600 planets discovered by Kepler are located between 300 and 3,000 light-years away \u2014 too far for composition measurements with current technology \u2014 while TESS will look at stars 10 times closer and 100 times brighter.<\/p>\n

In addition, Kepler has only pointed at certain parts of the sky, while TESS will take a broader look.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can go out on a dark night, and you can see 6,000 stars or so in the sky with your naked eye,\u201d Ricker said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to look at every single one of those stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Approximately 20 million stars will be visible by TESS\u2019s light-sensitive cameras, including targets up to a million times fainter than observable with the naked eye, Ricker said. Around 200,000 of those stars are \u201cpre-selected\u201d by the TESS science team for special emphasis because of their proximity and brightness.<\/p>\n

The TESS observatory will \u201cbuild upon the legacy of the Kepler mission, only it is going to focus on nearby bright stars that are sprinkled across the whole sky, and it\u2019s going to help us answer a really important question: Which of our nearest stellar neighbors have planets?\u201d said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist and TESS mission support scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.<\/p>\n

Each of TESS\u2019s cameras house four custom-built red-sensitive CCD detectors designed and developed by MIT\u2019s Lincoln Laboratory.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say that the CCDs that TESS is flying are the most perfect CCDs that have ever been flown on any science mission, NASA or otherwise,\u201d Ricker said.<\/p>\n

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Artist\u2019s concept of the field-of-view from TESS\u2019s four cameras, which will scan the sky in slices as illustrated in this image. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cTESS is a survey machine, and it\u2019s going to find the very best planets for us to follow-up, and among that category are these small rocky planets, transiting small red dwarf stars,\u201d said Sara Seager, deputy science director on the TESS mission at MIT.<\/p>\n

Data from TESS will tell astronomers the size of each planet. With that information, they can use other techniques like radial velocity measurements to determine each planet\u2019s mass and density.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeasuring masses is a really big deal because the planet mass is really definitive,\u201d Seager said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. \u201cIs it a rocky planet like Earth with a thin atmosphere? Is it a giant planet like Jupiter or Neptune that has a huge gas envelope?\u201d<\/p>\n

Ricker said he expects TESS to find between 500 and 1,000 planets that are between one and three times the size of Earth. Up to 20,000 planets the size of Neptune or Jupiter could be discovered by TESS, he said.<\/p>\n

That would grow the number of known planets beyond our solar system by factor of five or more, but it\u2019s not all about expanding the exoplanet catalog.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe focus that TESS has on finding systems associated with bright stars means that they will be much easier to follow-up,\u201d Ricker said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. \u201cOnce you find that a transiting system exists, it\u2019s something that you\u2019ll want to come back to and study more and more as improved instruments, satellites and telescopes become available because this is going to be the benchmark for future research.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where the James Webb Space Telescope becomes a crucial tool for astronomers seeking to learn more about the nature of faraway exoplanets. JWST will be able to probe the atmospheres of some of these worlds, learning about their chemical make-up and searching for evidence that the planets might be habitable.<\/p>\n

Once launched, the huge, expandable observatory \u201cwill be able to look for characteristic signatures of materials in the atmospheres of those planets \u2026 and something that\u2019s potentially a biogenic signature,\u201d Ricker told Spaceflight Now. \u201cOf course, that takes a lot of care and a lot of work. TESS can only point the way to these are the best targets that you should be focusing on with Webb.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT) with NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: Walter Scriptunas II\/Spaceflight Now NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, built to find planets around other stars that are close enough for detailed follow-ups by future telescopes, launched Wednesday into a unique high-altitude orbit on top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1690,1736,1573,559,479,25,2495,2898],"class_list":["post-13853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-astrophysics","tag-complex-40","tag-drone-ship","tag-exoplanets","tag-falcon-9","tag-launch","tag-leostar-2","tag-lincoln-laboratory"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}