Wednesday, April 10, 2013

TESS

NASA has announced plans for another satellite to look for extra solar planets. They have dubbed this TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite:
TESS will 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. Its goal is to identify terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. Its principal investigator is George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Just finding exoplanets has gotten routine -- there are 861 now -- so people are looking for something more, an actual earth-like world. Kepler, NASA's previous exoplanet-hunting satellite, hasn't been able to nail that down.

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