Descrizione : The a (TESS) project at MIT has been named by NASA as one of the 11 proposals recently accepted for evaluation as potential future science missions, the space agency announced in a press release.

The project, led by principal investigator George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MIT`s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI), would use an array of 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.


"TESS will carry out the first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission,” Ricker says. “It will identify thousands of new planets orbiting a broad range of stellar types, and with widely varying distances from their host star."

Winn says ground-based telescopes have revealed many details about transiting exoplanets, from their orbits to their atmospheres and compositions. However, these telescopes mainly pick out giant exoplanets. NASA`s Kepler spacecraft has 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. What`s more, the telescope array may be able to spot multiple planets around a single star.

TESS was one of five proposals selected as a potential “Explorer Mission,” and will receive $1 million to conduct an 11-month mission concept study. Project members include Ricker and Winn, along with Jacqueline Hewitt, professor of physics and director of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research; and Sara Seager, professor of physics and the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. MKI research scientists Roland Vanderspek and Joel Villasenor serve as deputy-principal investigator and payload scientist, respectively, while principal research scientist Alan Levine will oversee software efforts for the mission. TESS team members also include NASA`s Goddard Spaceflight Center, Orbital Sciences Corporation, NASA`s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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SPACEX FALCON 9 B4 · TESS RECHERCHE EXO-PLANETES (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite)

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