NASA announced on Friday that the The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be one of two mission scheduled for launch in 2017. TESS will use an array of six telescopes to perform an all-sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, in orbit around the nearest and brightest stars in the sky. Its goal is to identify terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. Its principal investigator is George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission,” Ricker says. “It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth.”
Partners in the mission include MIT, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center; Orbital Sciences Corporation; NASA’s Ames Research Center; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; The Aerospace Corporation; and the Space Telescope Science Institute.NASA Ames will manage the mission design, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance evaluations. Bay Area internet company Google also aided in the TESS project by providing a small seed grant funding the development of the spacecraft's wide-field digital cameras.
The other Explorer mission selected was Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER).
NICER will be mounted on the space station and measure the variability of cosmic X-ray sources, a process called X-ray timing, to explore the exotic states of matter within neutron stars and reveal their interior and surface compositions. The principal investigator is Keith Gendreau of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NASA's Explorer program is the agency's oldest continuous program and is designed to provide frequent, low-cost access to space using principal investigator-led space science investigations relevant to the Science Mission Directorate’s astrophysics and heliophysics programs. Satellite mission costs are capped at $200 million and space station mission costs are capped at $55 million. The X-ray space telescope NuSTAR is a currently operating Explorer mission.
The program has launched more than 90 missions. It began in 1958 with the Explorer 1, which discovered the Earth’s radiation belts. Another Explorer mission, the Cosmic Background Explorer, led to a Nobel prize. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Comments