After Three years of competition, NASA has
selected the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite shortly TESS the project
created by MIT for a planned launch in 2017. The space agency announced that
this project will be founded by $200 million grant.
TESS team partners include: MIT Kavli Institute
for Astrphysics and Space Research- shortly MKI and MIT Lincoln Laboratory,
NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Centar; Orbital Sciences Corporation, NASA's Ames Research
Center, the Harvar-Smitsonian Centar for Astrophysics, The Aerospace corporation,
and Space Telescope Science Institute.
The project is led by principal investigator
George Ricker who is a senior research scientist at MKI. This project will use an
array of wide field cameras to perform an all-sky survey to discover exoplantes,
ranging from Erath-sized planets to gas giants, in orbit around the brightest
stars in the sun’s neighborhood . An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet
outside of the Solar System. A total of 861 such planets have been identified
as of March 22, 2013 (SEE: Extrasolar planet).
More precisely an exoplanet is a planet that is orbiting a star other than the
sun and a transiting exoplanet is one that periodically eclipses its host star.
TESS will cover more than 400 times as much as any previous mission and it will
identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special
focus on planets, comparable in size to the Earth.
As a result, every two weeks TESS approaches
close enough to the Earth for high data-downlink rates, while remaining above
the planet’s harmful radiation belts. This special orbit will remain stable for
decades, keeping TESS’s sensitive cameras in a very stable temperature range.With
TESS, it will be possible to study the masses, sizes, densities, orbits and
atmospheres of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky
worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars. TESS will provide prime
targets for further characterization by the James Webb Space Telescope, as well
as other large ground-based and space-based telescopes of the future.
MKI research scientists Roland Vanderspek and
Joel Villasenor will serve as deputy principal investigator and payload
scientist, respectively. Principal research scientist Alan Levine serves as a
co-investigator. Tony Smith of Lincoln Lab will manage the TESS payload effort,
Lincoln Lab will develop the optical cameras and custom charge-coupled devices
required by the mission. NASA’s Explorer Program gives us a wonderful
opportunity to carry out forefront space science with a relatively small
university-based group and on a time scale well-matched to the rapidly evolving
field of extrasolar planets. At MIT, TESS has the involvement of faculty and
research staff of the Kavli Institute, the Department of Physics, and the
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, so we will be
actively engaging students in this exciting work.”
Previous sky surveys with ground-based
telescopes have mainly picked out giant exoplanets. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft
has recently uncovered the existence of many smaller exoplanets, but the stars
Kepler examines are faint and difficult to study. In contrast, TESS will
examine a large number of small planets around the very brightest stars in the
sky.
The other mission selected today by NASA is the
Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). It will be mounted on the
International 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.
NICER’s principal investigator is Keith Gendreau of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md. The MKI group, lead by Ricker, is also a partner in
the NICER mission.
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