NASA’s TESS Mission Aims to Discover New Alien Planets
NASA’s work never stops. There are many projects active at the moment and TESS is one of them. TESS – the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Is a new space telescope that should help NASA make some amazing new discoveries.
NASA has been working at this project for the past 10 years and on April 16 TESS will finally be launched in to space. Scientists hope that this new mission will help them find a planet that can hold life outside of your solar system.
Learning about new individual planets
This new satellite should be able to identify any planets that are the size of the Earth and it is supposed to investigate the habitable zone, aka the areas where liquid water could exist. “We’re going to be able study individual planets and start talking about the differences between planets. The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come. It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research,” declared Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist.
The theory of the scientists is that if there is an Earth sized planet in the habitable zone, then there is a big chance that there could exist life on that planet. TESS will explore stars that are relatively close to our galaxy. TESS is a project that comes to complete the discoveries of the Kepler Space Telescope.
“It’s going to help us answer a really important question, and that is is, ‘Which of our nearest stellar neighbors has planets?” said Elisa Quintana, a NASA astrophysicist. The satellite should look for small dips in the brightness of a star. These dips are created between transits and they should allow scientists calculate the size of the planet as well as other information about it.
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