Planet Hunting Telescope Does Moon Fly-by & Sends First Pictures Back to Earth

Almost a month to the day after launch NASA’s latest planet hunting satellite sent back its first test image to excited scientists back on earth. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is designed to look for nearby exoplanets, and so far it’s performing exactly the way it’s supposed to.

NASA Launched on Aril 18, the satellite conducted a moon fly-by in order to get a gravity boos that will help launch it toward its final orbit. As it did so, scientists used on of TESS’s four cameras to snap a two second test image which showed more than 200,000 stars! From EarthSky.org: TESS is the successor to the Kepler spacecraft, which discovered some 2,300 exoplanets over the course of its lifetime. NASA said in March that Kepler is expected to run out of fuel entirely within the next few months.

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TESS First Picture - NASA/MIT/TESS Unlike Kepler – which has a fixed field of view of the sky – TESS will search for exoplanets in some 85 percent of Earth’s sky. Scientists have divided the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will use its four wide-field cameras to map 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky during its first year of observations and 13 sectors of the northern sky during the second year. TESS will be watching for phenomena called transits. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its star from the observer’s perspective, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. More than 78 percent of the confirmed exoplanets – including those found by Kepler – have been found using transits, NASA said.

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NASA Most of Kepler’s exoplanets orbit faint stars between 300 and 3,000 light-years from Earth. TESS will focus on much closer stars – between 30 and 300 light-years away – and some 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets. The brightness of these target stars will allow future researchers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planet’s capacity to harbor life.

NASA TESS will enter it’s final orbit near the end of the month and is slated to begin science operations by mid June. We can’t wait to see the images it sends back to Earth. For information about the TESS mission, check out its page on the NASA website.