{"id":13862,"date":"2018-04-17T00:22:34","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:22:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/spacex-poised-to-launch-planet-hunter\/"},"modified":"2018-04-17T00:22:34","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:22:34","slug":"spacex-poised-to-launch-planet-hunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/spacex-poised-to-launch-planet-hunter\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX poised to launch planet-hunter"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"\"
Artist\u2019s concept of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SpaceX readied a Falcon 9 rocket for takeoff Monday to launch a planet-hunting satellite for NASA that will monitor the light from countless stars to find potentially habitable planets worthy of follow-up studies by more powerful ground- and space-based observatories.<\/p>\n

The Falcon 9, carrying the $337 million Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, was scheduled for launch from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:32 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) Monday, the opening of a short 30-second window. Forecasters predicted an 80 percent chance of favorable weather.<\/p>\n

The launching will mark SpaceX\u2019s eighth so far this year and the 53rd of a Falcon 9 overall. The company hopes to recover the rocket\u2019s first stage with a landing on an off-shore droneship, the \u201cOf Course I Still Love You.\u201d If successful, the California rocket-builder\u2019s record will stand at 24 booster landings, 12 on land and 12 on the deck of a ship.<\/p>\n

The rocket\u2019s second stage engine was expected to fire twice before releasing TESS into an elliptical orbit 49 minutes after launch. If all goes well, the spacecraft will fly past the moon on May 16 for a gravity-assist flyby that will put it in a unique 13.7-day orbit that will repeatedly use lunar gravity to maintain a stable trajectory.<\/p>\n

Once on station, TESS\u2019s four 16.8-megapixel cameras, each equipped with four state-of-the-art CCD detectors, will spend at least two years monitoring starlight across the southern and then northern skies, on the lookout for the tell-tale dimming that occurs when a planet moves in front of its host star \u2014 a transit \u2014 as viewed from the spacecraft.<\/p>\n

By carefully studying how the light dims and then brightens, astronomers analyzing TESS data will be able to detect the presence of worlds around countless stars across 85 percent of the sky, ranging from Earth-size planets to so-called \u201csuper Earths\u201d and on up the scale to gas giants as large or larger than Jupiter.<\/p>\n

But the goal is to identify stars hosting relatively small, rocky Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their suns at distances that allow water to exist as a liquid, a requirement for life as it is known on Earth.<\/p>\n

Prime candidates from TESS\u2019s survey will, in turn, be studied in detail by NASA\u2019s powerful James Webb Space Telescope after its launch in 2020, by an upcoming European Space Agency space telescope and follow-on spacecraft as well as huge ground-based observatories currently under construction.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can think of TESS as the finder scope for the James Webb Space Telescope,\u201d astrophysicist Padi Boyd, TESS deputy project scientist, told CBS News. \u201cTESS is basically the discoverer, it\u2019s going to find the really exciting planets that we can then follow up with powerful telescopes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is prepared for encapsulation inside the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s nose shroud. Credit: NASA\/Kim Shiflett<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics at NASA Headquarters, said with those larger telescopes, \u201cwe\u2019ll be able to look for tell-tale signs in the atmospheres of those planets that might tell us what the planets are made of and perhaps even whether they have the kinds of gases that on Earth are an indication of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTESS itself will not be able to find life beyond Earth,\u201d he said, \u201cbut TESS will help us figure out where to point our larger telescopes in that search.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since its launch in 2009, NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope, which also monitored shadow transits, has discovered thousands of exoplanets in a target area much smaller than TESS\u2019s. Based on statistical analysis, astronomers now believe virtually every star in the Milky Way hosts, or once hosted, one or more planets.<\/p>\n

TESS, built by Orbital ATK, was designed to take the search for exoplanets to another level, vastly expanding the number of stars monitored.<\/p>\n

TESS\u2019s four cameras, developed at MIT, are arranged to shoot 24-degree-wide squares stretching from the celestial equator to the poles, spending 27 days to collect a single 96-degree long sector. The spacecraft then will adjust its orientation and spend another 27 days collecting another sector. And so on.<\/p>\n

During a 27-day observation period, TESS will monitor the brightness of every star visible in all four cameras every 30 minutes. Fifteen thousand stars in each sector, selected before launch as prime candidates to host exoplanets, will be monitored every two minutes.<\/p>\n

It will take a year to collect the 13 sectors needed to map the southern sky and another year to map its northern counterpart.<\/p>\n

By the end of its initial two-year mission, TESS will have measured starlight across 85 percent of the sky. And unlike Kepler, the new observatory is optimized to study light from the most common stars in the galaxy, reddish M dwarfs that are smaller and cooler than Earth\u2019s sun.<\/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 said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \u201cWe\u2019re very sensitive to cool stars. It turns out that the majority of the stars in the Milky Way are cool stars that have a temperature about half that of the sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we\u2019ve optimized the field in such a way, because these are the types of stars that were really not possible to explore very well with Kepler.\u201d<\/p>\n

And because the M dwarf stars are one-half to one-quarter the diameter of Earth\u2019s sun, when an exoplanet passes in from \u201cit makes a much deeper shadow,\u201d Ricker said. \u201cAlso, they\u2019re cooler, so they emit less light, therefore the habitable zone is very close in, and the probability that you\u2019re going to have a transit is greatly increased.\u201d<\/p>\n

While TESS is fine tuned to find Earth-size or slightly larger planets orbiting their stars in those close-in habitable zones it also will collect data about larger planets orbiting brighter stars.<\/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 said Ricker. \u201cWe\u2019re going to look at every single one of those stars, and that\u2019s the real science yield that we\u2019re going to have with TESS.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we find the planets associated with them, those are going to be the primary candidates that everyone \u2014 all astronomers for centuries to come \u2014 (are) going to focus on. That\u2019s the excitement that we have about this mission. This is really a mission for the ages.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stuff of science fiction just a few decades ago, astronomers now envision using powerful new ground- and space-based telescopes in the years ahead to spectroscopically study starlight passing through the atmospheres of such exoplanets to look for traces of chemicals generated by industrial activity.<\/p>\n

While that will take instruments not yet built, \u201cthe TESS planets should be really great candidates for us to start to peer into the atmospheres of these planets with spectroscopy, what allows us to put together the atoms and molecules making up that atmosphere,\u201d Boyd said.<\/p>\n

But it will not be easy, and \u201cwe\u2019re going to need extremely large telescopes to start to really put the signatures of the atmospheres into perspective and search for life signs,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Kepler, Boyd said, was designed to answer one question: how common are Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe answer we got from Kepler was that planets are everywhere and that on average, every star in the Milky Way has a planet,\u201d she said. \u201cSo that\u2019s hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy. \u2026 Now TESS is taking Kepler\u2019s results, that planets are everywhere, and TESS will find the nearest transiting exoplanet systems to Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Artist\u2019s concept of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: NASA SpaceX readied a Falcon 9 rocket for takeoff Monday to launch a planet-hunting satellite for NASA that will monitor the light from countless stars to find potentially habitable planets worthy of follow-up studies by more powerful ground- and […]<\/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":[1690,1736,559,479,25,2495,2898,1766],"class_list":["post-13862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-astrophysics","tag-complex-40","tag-exoplanets","tag-falcon-9","tag-launch","tag-leostar-2","tag-lincoln-laboratory","tag-mit"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862"}],"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=13862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}