This image could contain hundreds of nearby undiscovered planets — including a few like Earth

pulse

September 18, 2018 6:02 PM

NASA has released the first images from its new orbiting space telescope. TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, could discover thousands of new planets.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
discover thousands of new planets

NASA has released the first image from its new space telescope.

TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is helping scientists detect and study new planets in other solar systems.

The telescope launched in April on a SpaceX rocket, and on July 25, TESS slipped into a unique orbit between Earth and the moon.

The telescope is now scanning the night sky, staring down distant solar systems, and hunting for small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

NASA just released the first science image captured by Tess, though it was actually taken in early August. The image above is just a portion of the full image — the bright part on the right is

The detailed image was produced using all four of the spacecraft's wide-field cameras for 30 minutes, while

NASA plans to have TESS monitor 85% of the sky over the next two years, focusing on a new sector every 27 days. TESS will study 13 sectors in the southern sky the first year, followed by 13 sectors in the northern sky the second year. By the end of that period, TESS is expected to have observed about 200,000 stars.

To hunt for planets, the telescope will look for changes in a star's brightness level — an indication that a planet is passing in front of the star as part of its orbit.

Scientists anticipate that data from TESS could reveal thousands of new planets that are within 200 light-years of Earth.

NASA has previously hunted for exoplanets with the Kepler space telescope, and detected thousands of them in a small part of the night sky. nearly run out of fuel and is currently in sleep mode.

TESS will scan a much larger region of the sky than Kepler did — and one that is closer to Earth.

"We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars," Hertz said inan April press release. "TESS will cast a wider net than ever before for enigmatic worlds."

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