TAMPA: Are we alone? Nasa’s new planet-hunting mission, poised to launch on Monday, aims to advance the search for extraterrestrial life by scanning the skies for nearby, Earth-like planets.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is poised to blast off at 6:32 pm (2232 GMT) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from a Nasa launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
At a total cost of $337 million, the washing-machine-size spacecraft is built to search the nearest, brightest stars for signs of periodic dimming.
These so-called “transits” may mean that planets are in orbit around them.
TESS is expected to reveal 20,000 planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, Nasa said.
Its discoveries will be studied further by ground- and space-based telescopes for signs of habitability, including a rocky terrain, a size similar to Earth, and a distance from their sun — neither too close nor too far — that allows the right temperature for liquid water.
Nasa predicts that TESS could find more than 50 Earth-sized planets and up to 500 planets less than twice the size of the Earth.
TESS will survey far more cosmic terrain than its predecessor, Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope which launched in 2009, taking in some 85 per cent of the skies.
“TESS is equipped with four very sensitive cameras that will be able to monitor nearly the entire sky,” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“That is about 20 times what the Kepler mission was able to detect.” — AFP
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