SpaceX launches planet-hunting TESS to space before landing rocket back on Earth
Have fun in space, TESS!
Our favorite new NASA mission -- called TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite -- launched to space at 6:51 p.m. ET on Wednesday, and the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the satellite landed back on Earth on a drone ship in the Atlantic not long after.
TESS is on a mission to hunt for never-before-seen alien planets circling distant stars, particularly those that have the potential for hosting alien life.
TESS plans to survey 85 percent of the sky, keeping a particular eye on 200,000 stars once it gets to its expected orbit in the coming weeks.
The satellite is designed to look for planets around those stars using the transit method, meaning that it will detect small dips in a star's light that occur when a planet passes across the face of its star from TESS's perspective.
This isn't the first time the transit method has been used in orbit. NASA's Kepler Space Telescope discovered thousands of transiting planets through this method, but TESS will fill in the gaps that Kepler has left.
Most of the worlds that Kepler found circle stars that are exceedingly far from our own, but TESS is designed to find worlds in our cosmic backyard by comparison.
"The Kepler space telescope found an astounding number of exoplanets, but most of them are many, many light years away, too dim for us to learn much about them," Lisa Kaltenegger, exoplanet scientist at Cornell University, said in a statement.
"That’s why TESS is so important: it will find exoplanets around stars in our cosmic backyard. TESS will provide a list of our top neighboring worlds for any follow up observations, as well as any far future travel plans."
It's even possible that TESS could find world that might be able to host life.
The planet hunter is designed to find planets that are about the size of Earth in the habitable zones of stars that are smaller and dimmer than our sun. Perhaps some world with liquid water on its surface exists not far from our own home planet. TESS could find it.
TESS will also pave the way for followup observations of the planets it finds.
Ground and space-based telescopes -- such as the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope -- will be able to check out the relatively nearby planets found by TESS, catching a glimpse of their atmospheres and even establishing whether or not they could maybe, possibly, host life.
"We plan to followup atmospheres with JWST and we have the capability to find water vapor and signs of life by way of gases that don’t belong that might be attributed to life," MIT exoplanet hunter Sara Seager said via email.
"Planet finding never gets old. I hope the public will joyfully share in discoveries."
Topics SpaceX
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
