Every once in a while opportunities are presented of a different nature, this time the call is coming to you soon! After TESS's successful launch, the first data downlinks of the light signatures of 200,000 stars will be delivered beginning in January next year. On April 18, 2018 SpaceX successfully launched and deployed NASA’s brand new planet-hunting satellite named TESS on Wednesday night, delighting scientists and space exploration fans worldwide who anticipate that the spacecraft will discover many new planets in our Galaxy capable of supporting life.
For a triple success SpaceX landed the first-stage booster at sea, the space company’s 24th such successful recovery. Amazingly TESS launched on the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida leaving bystanders breathless and in awe of what comes next.
TESS, which stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is a telescope and camera array that will hunt for thousands of new worlds around nearby stars. Unlike the highly successful Kepler Mission, which studied the Lyrae and Cygnus star constellations in the nearby universe, this time we will be looking right here in our own universal back yard..
the Milky Way Galaxy.
This new satellite will provide new targets for future studies that will be able to assess new planetary classifications and universal elemental abundancies. TESS will spend the next 60 days getting into its proper orbit. NASA and SpaceX crews applauded and cheered at each stage of the process and at one hour and nine minutes after launch they announced 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 the help of a gravitational assist from the moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth. The orbit of the new satellite is carefully planned to account for the moon’s gravity.
The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon around other stars known as a transit, when a planet passes in front of its star causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. NASA’s history making transit survey telescope the Kepler used the same transit method to detect thousands of planets. TESS is designed to concentrate on stars less than 300 light-years away, about 200,000 of them in total initially. 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 led and operated by MIT and managed by NASA's Goddard. Orbital ATK manufactured and designed the satellite for NASA.
SpaceX Vice President for Mission Assurance Hans Koenigsmann said previously that the second stage of the rocket carrying TESS would not be recovered. He also stated there is something new happening here with the current mission, SpaceX planned to fire the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket and kick it out of orbit so that it doesn’t become space trash. Leading the way to new understandings upcoming TESS data releases will create tons of buzz and excitement in our science communities, stay in touch to get follow ups.
By,
JLC
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