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. </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> Washington, April 12 (IANS) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess aimed at detecting planets outside our solar system, is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on April 16.

The mission is scheduled to launch no earlier around 4.02 a.m. on April 17 (India time) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA said on Wednesday.

Tess is NASA’s next step in the search for exoplanets, including those that could support life.

Once in orbit, Tess will spend about two years surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to search for planets outside our solar system.

Tess will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbour life.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement.

Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 per cent of our entire sky.

Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away </s> SpaceX postponed the launch of NASA’s new planet-hunting mission Monday in order to verify the Falcon 9 rocket’s navigation systems, the California-based company said.

The next opportunity to blast off the $337 million satellite — which aims to advance the search for extraterrestrial life by scanning the skies for nearby, Earth-like planets will be Wednesday.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is “in excellent health and remains ready for launch,” SpaceX said on Twitter.

“Launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional guidance navigation and control analysis.”

The postponement was announced about two hours before the planned blast off from a NASA launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The washing machine-sized spacecraft is built to search the nearest, brightest stars for signs of periodic dimming. These so-called “transits” may mean that planets are in orbit around them.

TESS is expected to reveal 20,000 planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, NASA said.

Its discoveries will be studied further by ground- and space-based telescopes for signs of habitability, including rocky terrain, a size similar to Earth and a distance from their sun — neither too close nor too far — that allows the right temperature for liquid water.

NASA predicts that TESS could find more than 50 Earth-sized planets and up to 500 planets less than twice the size of the Earth.

TESS will survey far more cosmic terrain than its predecessor, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which launched in 2009, taking in some 85 percent of the skies.

“TESS is equipped with four very sensitive cameras that will be able to monitor nearly the entire sky,” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“That is about 20 times what the Kepler mission was able to detect.”

– Kepler vs TESS –

 Kepler, the first planet-hunting mission of its kind, “was launched to answer one single question: How common is a planet like Earth around a star like the Sun?” said Patricia “Padi” Boyd, director of the TESS guest investigator program at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center.

“It was designed to look at 150,000 stars in a fairly wide field of view without blinking, for four years,” she told reporters on the eve of the launch.

“One of the many amazing things that Kepler told us is that planets are everywhere and there are all kinds of planets out there.

“So TESS takes the next step. If planets are everywhere, then it is time for us to find the planets that are closest to us orbiting bright nearby stars, because these will be the touchstone system.”

TESS and Kepler use the same system of detecting planetary transits, or shadows cast as they pass in front of their star.

While Kepler confirmed some 2,300 exoplanets and thousands more potential planet candidates, many were too distant and dim to be studied further.

With Kepler running low on fuel and nearing the end of its life, TESS aims to pick up the search while focusing closer, on planets dozens to hundreds of light years away.

“TESS is going to dramatically increase the number of planets that we have to study,” said Ricker.

The Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2020, should be able to reveal more about planets’ mass, density and the makeup of their atmosphere — all clues to habitability.

The first data from TESS is expected to be made public in July, and NASA says citizen astronomers are welcome to help study the planets.

It may be decades before astronomers know whether or not life exists elsewhere.”TESS is the first step,” said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center.

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This post was syndicated from The Guardian Nigeria Newspaper – Nigeria and World News. Click here to read the full text on the original website. </s> New Delhi: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is all set to launch its next planet-hunting spacecraft on Monday, April 16 at 6:32 pm EDT (4.02 am IST, April 17). The spacecraft is scheduled to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission will study thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighbourhood.

The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits.

TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement.

Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of our entire sky.

Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star's brightness.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away </s> On a mission to detect planets outside of our solar system, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT Monday, April 16. Prelaunch mission coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website Sunday, April 15, with three live briefings.

TESS is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets, including those that could support life. The mission is expected to catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.

NASA TV coverage is as follows:
• Jenn Burt, Torres postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( )
• Zach Berta-Thompson, assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder
• Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX
• Jessie Christiansen, staff scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech
• Mike McAleenan, weather officer with the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron
• This half-hour live show will discuss the TESS spacecraft, the science of searching for planets outside our solar system, and the launch from Cape Canaveral.

TESS will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The deadline for media accreditation for this launch has passed. For information about media accreditation, contact [email protected].

For the latest schedule of prelaunch briefings, events and NASA TV coverage, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/content/tess-prelaunch-briefings-and-events

Learn more about TESS at: https://www.nasa.gov/tess </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> 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> Washington: The launch of a new NASA satellite, which will hunt for exoplanets that have the potential to harbour alien life, has been delayed to April 18.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), was supposed to launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in the early hours today.

“Launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional Guidance Navigation and Control analysis. The @NASA_TESS spacecraft is in excellent health and remains ready for launch on the new targeted date of Wednesday, April 18,” NASA wrote in a tweet.

“We expect TESS will discover a number of planets whose atmospheric compositions, which hold potential clues to the presence of life, could be precisely measured by future observers,” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth. Sixty days after launch, and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission.

The satellite, developed by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, aims to discover thousands of nearby exoplanets, including at least 50 Earth-sized ones.

The spacecraft, not much larger than a refrigerator, carries four cameras that will survey the nearest, brightest stars in the sky for signs of passing planets.

TESS will spend two years scanning nearly the entire sky – a field of view that can encompass more than 20 million stars.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness.

The TESS science team at MIT aims to measure the masses of at least 50 small planets whose radii are less than four times that of Earth.

Many of TESS’s planets should be close enough to our own that, once they are identified by TESS, scientists can zoom in on them using other telescopes, to detect atmospheres, characterise atmospheric conditions, and even look for signs of habitability.

“TESS is kind of like a scout,” said Natalia Guerrero, deputy manager of TESS Objects of Interest, an MIT-led effort that will catalogue objects captured in TESS data that may be potential exoplanets.

“We’re on this scenic tour of the whole sky, and in some ways we have no idea what we will see. It’s like we’re making a treasure map,” Guerrero said.

After TESS launches, the team expects that the satellite will reestablish contact within the first week, during which it will turn on all its instruments and cameras.

Then, there will be a 60-day commissioning phase, as engineers at NASA and MIT calibrate the instruments and monitor the satellite’s trajectory and performance.

After that, TESS will begin to collect and downlink images of the sky. Scientists at MIT and NASA will take the raw data and convert it into light curves that indicate the changing brightness of a star over time. (PTI0
SpaceX's scheduled launch of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is delayed until April 18. TESS is designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method and is 400 times more powerful than the Kepler space observatory.