“You can think of TESS as the finder scope for the James Webb Space Telescope,” astrophysicist Padi Boyd, TESS deputy project scientist, told CBS News.

Prime candidates from TESS’s survey will, in turn, be studied in detail by NASA’s 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.

“Missions like TESS will help us keep learning so that eventually we can answer the question, are we alone? Or do we just have the best prime real estate in the galaxy?”īy 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 “super Earths” and on up the scale to gas giants as large or larger than Jupiter.īut 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. Now, we know that for every star in the sky that you look at, there’s probably a family of planets around it. “Up until 20 years ago, we didn’t know of any planets beyond our own solar system. “People have always wanted to know are we alone in the universe,” said Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics at NASA Headquarters. In a modest mission with the grandest of intentions, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a planet-hunting satellite for NASA Wednesday that will measure the light from millions of stars, on the lookout for indications of Earth-like, potentially habitable worlds scattered across the nearby Milky Way.īuilding on the legacy of NASA’s trail-blazing Kepler mission, which showed that exoplanets are commonplace, the $337 million Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will study vastly more stars across 85 percent of the sky in a bid to pinpoint thousands of new planets with the emphasis on Earth-size or slightly larger.

Spacex launches nasa planet-hunting s