CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. — After scrubbing an attempted launch on Monday evening, SpaceX and NASA plan to send a probe into space on Wednesday evening to search for alien worlds.
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The Falcon 9 rocket is set to take off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:51 p.m., Wednesday.

The 200-foot-tall rocket will carry the NASA TESS spacecraft, which stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. The probe will hunt and scan for planets outside of our solar system that could support life as humans know it.

During TESS' two-year mission, four cameras will study and catalog 200,000 planet candidates. TESS will survey a larger area than the NASA Kelper probe, which launched in 2009, and find planets that are close enough to check out with Earth-based telescopes.

After the launch attempt, SpaceX will attempt to land the first-stage booster on its drone ship hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean about 10 minutes after launch. The booster is new and has not flown before.

In addition, SpaceX is now trying to recover its payload fairing — which is the big nose cone on the Falcon 9. SpaceX is hoping to use parachutes to help guide the nose cone to a soft landing on the ocean surface after launch. </s> CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - SpaceX postponed a planned launch on Monday of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA's latest planet-hunting satellite for 48 hours, citing problems with a guidance-navigation control system, launch team officials said.

Blast-off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida has been delayed until at least Wednesday, according to Space Exploration Technologies, which NASA contracted to loft its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, into orbit.

 

 (Reporting by Joey Roulette at Cape Canaveral, Florida; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Sandra Maler) </s> NASA’s powerful, planet-hunting satellite TESS was supposed to launch into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on Monday, but plans were nixed at the last moment due to unspecified complications. The satellite is designed to search for evidence of exoplanets — that is, planets outside of our own Solar System — and scientists are excited about what they might find. But before the work can begin, the spacecraft has to actually reach orbit, and that’s SpaceX’s job. The launch was slated to take place from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Monday evening, but was pushed back so that SpaceX could “conduct additional GNC analysis.”

The launch, which is now scheduled for Wednesday, will feature a brand new Falcon 9, as opposed to the used (sorry, “flight proven”) rockets that the company sometimes uses after recovering and refurbishing them. The first stage of the rocket will tumble back down to Earth and, if all goes according to plan, SpaceX will recover it on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean.

As it has already attempted twice, SpaceX will also try to recover the payload fairing, which is a two-piece section of the spacecraft’s nosecone situated at its top. In the past, the company has tried to capture one half of the fairing with a massive net attached to a ship, but both of those attempts failed. This time, the fairing halves will glide back down to the ocean on parachutes, and SpaceX hopes that they will be in good shape after splashdown.

Once in orbit, the TESS satellite will stretch its solar panels and begin powering itself, and while the exact timeline of its scientific mission could vary depending on many factors, it should begin peering into the depths of space soon. Hunting for exoplanets is no easy task, and it’s only been within the last few years that exoplanet discoveries have begun to ramp up. TESS promises to continue that trend as it hunts for unseen worlds many light years away.

SpaceX hasn’t provided my additional details regarding the delay of the launch, but we know that “GNC” means “guidance, navigation and control,” so it sounds like it was a pretty serious issue. When you’re ferrying NASA hardware to space, it’s important to get it right, so hopefully all of SpaceX’s systems are in good shape for Wednesday’s launch. </s> After a delay, SpaceX is winding up again to launch NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) today (April 18) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

The 30-second launch window of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is set for 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT), and you can watch the launch live on Space.com's home page starting at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), courtesy of NASA TV. After launch, the rocket's first stage is set to attempt a landing on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

After it reaches space, TESS will maneuver into an oblong orbit around Earth, circling twice for each orbit of the moon. From there, it will search for a telltale darkening of stars as planets pass in front of them. It will use this technique to identify exoplanets relatively near to Earth that could be investigated by future telescopes, such as the James Webb. It will build on the work of the Kepler space telescope, which found exoplanets in a similar way but circled the sun, rather than Earth, and focused on one small patch of the sky for its first mission. Kepler has identified 2,650 exoplanets to date, which is more than 70 percent of all known, alien worlds.

The TESS launch was called off April 16 to allow scientists to conduct more guidance navigation and control analysis of the rocket, NASA officials wrote on Twitter. "The @NASA_TESS spacecraft is in excellent health and remains ready for launch on the new targeted date of Wednesday, April 18," they added. NASA's Kennedy Space Center also confirmed on Twitter that the launch would proceed April 18, and SpaceX posted that everything was looking good this morning.

Weather is looking good for today's launch, with the Air Force's 45th Space Wing weather squadron forecasting that conditions will be more than 90 percent favorable for the launch.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. </s> CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA's newest planet-hunting spacecraft will have to wait another couple of days before lifting off.

Two hours before Monday evening's scheduled launch, SpaceX announced it needed more time to check its rocket, which will carry the satellite to orbit. The next attempt will be Wednesday night.

The satellite known as Tess will survey almost the entire sky, staring at the brightest, closest stars in an effort to find any planets that might be encircling them. These mysterious worlds beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, could harbor life.

Scientists expect Tess — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — to discover thousands of rocky and icy planets and gas giants, maybe even water worlds and places defying imagination. Bigger and more powerful observatories of the future will scrutinize these prime candidates for potential signs of life.

SpaceX said extra time is needed to examine the Falcon 9 rocket's guidance, navigation and control system. Additional information was not immediately available, according to a spokesman.

SpaceX sometimes uses recycled rocket boosters, but this one is brand new. The company hopes to land this first stage on a floating ocean platform following liftoff, and reuse it on a space station supply run for NASA this summer.

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content. </s> SpaceX’s launch team loaded super-chilled liquid propellants into a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday and fired the booster’s nine first stage engines at Cape Canaveral, marching toward liftoff Monday with a NASA observatory built to find planets around other stars in our galactic neighborhood.

The Falcon 9’s nine Merlin 1D booster engines ignited at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT) Wednesday as hold-down clamps kept the rocket firmly on Earth at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad. A plume of exhaust visible from nearby viewing points appeared at the launch pad, and SpaceX tweeted later Wednesday that the static fire test was complete.

The hold-down firing was a key milestone in the run-up to launch Monday of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, an approximately $337 million mission that will survey the sky in search of tell-tale dips in light from bright, nearby stars. The brief, slight reduction in brightness registered by TESS could be evidence of a planet passing in front of the star.

TESS will be the first NASA space science satellite to launch on a SpaceX rocket, and it’s the space agency’s second mission devoted to finding and cataloguing exoplanets.

NASA’s Kepler observatory, launched in March 2009, looked for planets around stars residing in a section of the sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, then expanded its survey to observe other parts of the sky in the ecliptic plane, the relatively flat imaginary plane where our solar system’s planets reside.

Kepler has found more than confirmed 2,652 exoplanets, and 2,724 candidate discoveries await follow-up observations before astronomers declare those detections as real planets, according to data published in NASA’s exoplanet archive. Looping around the sun in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, Kepler has discovered more than 70 percent of all the known exoplanets to date.

But TESS will look for exoplanets across 85 percent of the sky, giving astronomers a more three-dimensional survey of worlds lurking in other solar systems, focusing on bright stars that are in the same part of the Milky Way galaxy as the sun.

The new TESS observatory will “build upon the legacy of the Kepler mission, only it is going to focus on nearby bright stars that are sprinkled across the whole sky, and it’s going to help us answer a really important question: Which of our nearest stellar neighbors have planets?” said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist and TESS mission support scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

TESS carries four science cameras developed by MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Each camera contains a 16.8-megapixel sensor covering a field of view of 24-by-24 degrees, with the sensitivity to detect faint dips in star brightness and a coverage area wide enough to look at thousands of targets.

“The coverage of the TESS cameras is unprecedented in terms of the amount of sky that they can actually see at any given time, and also their ability to cover such a broad portion of the sky,” said George Ricker, the mission’s principal investigator from MIT. “The types of targets that TESS will allow us to find will enclose essentially all the bright nearby stars.”

Liftoff of TESS is scheduled for 6:32:07 p.m. EDT (2232:07 GMT) Monday from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral. The day’s launch window extends for 30 seconds.

TESS will launch into an egg-shaped preliminary orbit stretching as far as 155,000 miles (250,000 kilometers) from Earth, around 60 percent of the distance to the moon. Once deployed from the Falcon 9’s second stage, the roughly 815-pound (370-kilogram) spacecraft will fire thrusters to boost the farthest arc of its orbit to intercept the moon.

TESS will swing by the moon, using lunar gravity to slingshot toward the mission’s operating orbit. A final major maneuver will steer the satellite on a path taking it around the planet once every two weeks in a 2:1 resonance with the moon, with distances ranging between 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) and 233,000 miles (376,000 kilometers) from Earth.

“The Falcon 9 does a lot of the lifting for us, and then the moon does most of the rest of it,” said Robert Lockwood, TESS program director at Orbital ATK, which built the spacecraft.

The launch of TESS is timed to ensure the moon is in the right place in its orbit around Earth to allow the satellite to make its crucial lunar flyby. If Monday’s launch is delayed or scrubbed, launch opportunities will not be available on some days due to moon’s orbital dynamics.

But Ricker said Wednesday that TESS can blast off any day through April 21, before waiting for a new block of potential launch dates around the end of April.

Since arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in February, TESS has been fueled with maneuvering propellant for its rocket thrusters, and encapsulated inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing, the aerodynamic shell that will protect the spacecraft during the first few minutes of launch.

Now that the static fire test is complete, the TESS spacecraft and the rocket’s nose cone will be moved to SpaceX’s hangar at pad 40, where ground crews will install the payload once the Falcon 9 is lowered off its launch mount and rolled back inside.

The Falcon 9 rocket assigned to the TESS mission will fly with a new first stage booster, and SpaceX is expected to attempt to recover the stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for potential refurbishment and reuse. TESS will launch with the final newly-manufactured “Block 4” version of SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, before several upgrades will debut in a new “Block 5” version set to launch for the first time in early May.

It will take around two months for TESS to settle into its unusual orbit and complete post-launch testing. Then scientists will press the observatory into a two-year mission searching for exoplanets.

Ricker proposed the TESS mission to NASA in 2012, and the project won government funding the next year. Now the mission is days from launch.

“It feels wonderful in one way,” Ricker said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “It’s a little bit daunting because now that it’s really going to happen, we’ll see the rocket light and that will be all that we can conceivably do. We’ve done pretty much everything we can with the instruments and the spacecraft by delivering them here to Kennedy (Space Center) so that the launch preparations can really occur in earnest.”

Expect some new worlds added to the exoplanet count by the end of the year.

“I think there’s going to be a teething problem as there always will be with a new satellite,” Ricker said. “So it will probably be some time in the fall before we have some interesting results to share.” </s> CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A SpaceX Falcon 9 test fire Wednesday has cleared the way for the launch of NASA’s next-generation exoplanet hunter.

The commercial space company is set to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, on Monday at 6:32 p.m. from Cape Canaveral.

SpaceX conducted an engine test Monday afternoon, firing up the rocket's nine Merlin engines on the pad. The company said on Twitter it is now officially targeting Monday for launch.

After the launch, SpaceX will land its rocket's first stage core on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.

TESS, an MIT-led mission, is expected to discover thousands of Earth-size planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. The spacecraft will scan almost the entire sky searching for planets transiting, or passing, in front of their stars.

The mission will build on NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which is coming to an end as the probe runs out of fuel. TESS will scan an area 350 times greater than Kepler.

Planet hunting has exploded in the last 23 years since the first exoplanet discovery of 51 Pegasi b. After Kepler’s 2009 launch the spacecraft started finding multiplanet systems and lone exoplanets orbiting stars. To date, Kepler and its team have found more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets.

Dr. Daniel Batcheldor, who leads the physics and space sciences department at the Florida Institute of Technology, said the astronomy community long suspected we weren't the only system with planets orbiting its star.

"Why would our solar system be unique?" Batcheldor said. "We’ve been holding our breath, we’ve known for hundreds of years, because of Kepler we know there are billions of planets around stars."

Kepler confirmed that complex planetary systems, like ours, are also common.

Batcheldor said now it's just a question of finding out how interesting these planets are and if they can support life. Kepler and TESS have a different, but similar approach, to do that.

The Kepler spacecraft stared at one patch of sky, looking at hundreds of thousands of stars for a slight wink when a planet passes in front of the star.

TESS will look at the nearest and brightest stars in the whole sky while it's in a high elliptical orbit of Earth.

When NASA launches its James Webb Space Telescope in 2020 the two missions will work together to tell us more about these new worlds.

TESS will tell James Webb what to look at, and the powerful telescope can look for the planets' atmosphere traces.

When a planet passes in front of the star, the star's light passes through the planet's atmosphere, using transit spectroscopy, the infrared telescope will look at the characteristics of that light to determine if there are life-supporting elements, including water.

The data from TESS will influence future missions to come.

"TESS will show us where we need to point the next spacecraft," Batcheldor said.

Check back to watch the launch live at ClickOrlando.com/space. </s> The launch of NASA's new planet-seeking satellite has been delayed for at least 48 hours.

The much-anticipated launch of NASA’s newest exoplanet hunter has been rescheduled, the U.S. space agency announced in a brief news release.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey (TESS) satellite was supposed to lift off from the NASA launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday (April 16) evening at 6:32 p.m. EDT (22:32 GMT).

However, an issue with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which will blast off from Space Launch Complex 40 carrying NASA’s planet-seeking spacecraft, has forced the company to scrub the first attempt to launch the TESS satellite.

The reason for the delay seems to be a problem with the rocket’s side, Space.com reports.

To fix the Falcon 9 issue, the SpaceX launch crew need additional time to conduct an analysis of the rocket’s Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) system, NASA explained in the news release.

Therefore, the TESS launch has been postponed until tomorrow (April 18) at the earliest, as both NASA and SpaceX are working together to prepare the rocket for liftoff.

NASA representatives wrote on Twitter that the TESS spacecraft, operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is “in excellent health” and awaits patiently for the rescheduled launch time.

Shortly before NASA’s social media announcement, the SpaceX launch team tweeted that they were standing down and that the TESS launch had been put off until tomorrow.

People waiting to see the live coverage of the big launch will have to wait at least 48 hours. The broadcast, originally set to air yesterday at 6 p.m., has been scrubbed until the Falcon 9 problem is addressed and the TESS launch is back on schedule.

According to Spaceflight Now, the rescheduled TESS launch will probably take place tomorrow at 6:51 p.m. EDT (22:51 GMT), depending on the spacecraft’s orbital target and the position of the moon.

The moon’s position is relevant in the novel type of orbit NASA has chosen for the TESS satellite. The planet-hunting spacecraft will use a special, highly-elliptical orbit, with a 2:1 lunar resonance, shows Spaceflight 101.

This will ensure that TESS reaches apogee with the moon at a phasing of 90 degrees, allowing its orbit to remain stable for at least 10 years.

This highly-elliptical orbit will help maximize TESS’s field of vision, making it possible for the satellite’s four cameras to image up to 85 percent of the sky.

“That is about 20 times what the Kepler mission was able to detect,” George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at MIT, said in a statement.

TESS’s prime mission is to survey up to 200,000 stars for a period of two years, with the goal of finding potential exoplanets that might be orbiting them.

NASA estimates that its exoplanet-seeking satellite will track down around 20,000 planets beyond our solar system, Phys.org reports. </s> NASA and SpaceX are putting the final touches to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission at Cape Canaveral, ahead of its launch window on Monday, April 16.

TESS is the next phase of the space agency’s search for planets outside our Solar System and aims to blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than 6.32 pm EDT. The event will be broadcast live on NASA TV.

NASA’s Kepler mission, which has confirmed the existence of over a thousand exoplanets and counting, has captured the public imagination with descriptions of worlds far outside our Solar System that may be capable of hosting alien life. The data it gathered over four years is still being analysed but the spacecraft, although still operational for now, has ended its primary world-hunting mission.

TESS hopes to pick up where Kepler left off by surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near to the Sun to search for transiting exoplanets. The research team behind the project, including scientists from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and MIT (along with dozens of other universities and institutes) are hoping that TESS will provide details of thousands more planet candidates to vastly increase the current known number of exoplanets. As of today, there are 3,758 known worlds out there, but just 53 are considered potentially habitable.

TESS’ job is not only to find more exoplanets, but also identify the most promising ones that orbit our nearest and brightest stars so that scientists can run follow-up studies that will perhaps finally find a habitable, or indeed inhabited, world.

“The stars TESS will study are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed, which will enable far easier follow-up observations with both ground-based and space-based telescopes. TESS will also cover a sky area 400 times larger than that monitored by Kepler,” NASA explains on the TESS mission pages.

Right now, TESS is awaiting the go at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40, where it has just been sealed inside the Falcon 9 payload fairing in preparation for its move to the launch pad.

NASA TV coverage will start at 11am on Sunday with an overview of the mission and prelaunch and science news. Coverage will continue on Monday with a half-hour live show at 10am, followed by the live launch itself beginning at 6pm ahead of blast-off at 6.32.
NASA's TESS exoplanet space telescope, whose launch was initially delayed, is successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station by SpaceX on a Falcon 9 rocket. The first stage of the rocket successfully landed on SpaceX's autonomous spaceport drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.