Yesterday, NASA (in collaboration with SpaceX) launched the TESS satellite, a spacecraft developed with the aim of identifying thousands of alien worlds in star systems light years away from Earth. TESS stands for Transitioning Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and will take two years to survey roughly 85 percent of the night sky. TESS is the industry’s first space-born all-sky transit survey that will determine several details about exoplanets like their size and even their physical composition. The planet hunting abilities possessed by TESS are unachievable by any ground-based telescopes or technologies, however, the satellite’s primary objective is to identify the existence and abstract details of exoplanets for more powerful telescopes to observe. The video below gets into great detail about TESS, and explains everything from the satellite’s primary exoplanet-hunting objectives, to the methods this revolutionary craft uses when looking for other worlds.
Filed Under: Aerospace + defense
