The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a planned space telescope for NASA's Small Explorer program, designed to search for extrasolar planets using the transit method. Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with seed funding from Google,[2] TESS was one of 11 proposals selected for NASA funding in September 2011, down from the original 22 submitted in February of that year.[3] On April 5, 2013, it was announced that TESS, along with the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER), had been selected for launch in 2017.[1][4]
Mission concept [edit]
Once launched, the telescope would conduct a two-year all-sky survey program for exploring transiting exoplanets around nearby and bright stars.[1] TESS would be equipped with four wide-angle telescopes and charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors, with a total size of 192 megapixels. Science data will be processed and stored for three months onboard, and only data of interest will be transmitted to Earth for further analysis. Data collected by the spacecraft are also stored for three months, enabling astrophysicists to search the data for an unexpected, transient phenomenon, such as a gamma-ray burst.
Scientific objectives [edit]
The survey will focus on G- and K- type stars with apparent magnitudes brighter than 12.[5] Approximately 2 million of these stars would be studied, including the 1,000 closest red dwarfs. TESS is predicted to discover 1,000 - 10,000 transiting exoplanet candidates which are Earth-sized or larger, with orbital periods of up to two months. These candidates could be later investigated by the HARPS spectrometer and the future James Webb Space Telescope. The development team at MIT is so optimistic about the mission that they have suggested that the first manned interstellar space missions may be to planets discovered by TESS.[6]
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