In a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a small telescope is being placed on a plateau for the final series of tests before launch. The reason why the test is extremely strict is that the four cameras of this telescope will have no protective cover when fired. This is one of the simplified design decisions NASA has made to help TSP achieve its goal of detecting at least 50 potential small-sized rocky planets.
In fact, the TESS proposal is even older than NASA’s Kepler telescope project. Kepler, launched in 2009, confirms the space survivability of the extraterrestrial planetary probe. Both telescopes have adopted the “Lingri method” to find extraterrestrial planets. The Kepler telescope not only confirms that Lingri Fa is a powerful planetary search technology but also finds that our galaxy is populated with an alarming number of planets, many of which are two to four times larger than our own.
In the initial mission phase, the Kepler telescope searched for stars a thousand light-years away in the starry sky of Cygnus, Lyra and Draco. So far, scientists have determined that out of the roughly 170,000 stars Kepler has explored, 2,341 aliens orbiting these stars revolve around them. Another 4496 candidate planets have not yet been identified, but many of the planets may never be validated because their host stars are too dim to make ground-based telescopes more difficult to observe in subsequent studies.
TESS project team used a reverse observation method, first using the ground observation station to determine the candidate class of planets, and then astronomical telescopes to determine the observation target. They selected about 200,000 stars for the first two years of TESS’s mission. The European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope details each of the target stars, and the Gaia telescope is creating a catalog of the universe’s most complete planetary positions and distances ever recorded.
Most of TESS’s targets are within 300 light-years of Earth’s distance and closer to most of the stars explored by the Kepler telescope, and their brightness is even brighter. Stephen Rinehart, a project scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said: “In the TESS project, we will be able to conduct follow-up ground tracking studies of all our targets and that’s a matter of sequence and there is no issue of ability.”
Ling-day detection technology to detect the relative size of the planet and host stars. If multiple canvassing phenomena can be observed, scientists can also determine the position of the star’s orbit from the star. This information can then be used to assess its temperature and the likelihood of liquid water on its surface, which is the planet Is a key factor in livable.
But assessing the mass of a planet requires determining whether it is made of metals and rocks similar to the Earth or ice and gas, when astronomers probe with a geospatial telescope. This usually requires a medium-sized observatory to observe the star’s light swing caused by gravitational attraction. The TESS project is recruiting dozens of astronomers to participate in the project, and plans to use the free time of several ground-based telescopes for follow-up research.
TESS is currently scheduled to launch in mid-April this year, about two months after its launch, it will begin to search nearby nearby planets. At that time, the astronomical telescope should have reached a certain point in Earth’s orbit, orbiting roughly 67,300 miles from Earth, and then it will approach the lunar orbit, some 234,000 miles away. When TESS is at its highest point in Earth’s orbit, the moon will form a 90-degree angle on the left or right hand side of it, becoming its orbital stabilizer, enabling TESS to achieve gravitational forces over the decades without manipulating the thrusters Stable.
This eccentric orbit allows TESS to remain in deep space for most of the time, which also minimizes the effects of light reflected from Earth and the Moon. TESS runs around the Earth every 13.7 days, twice as fast as the moon. As TESS approaches the Earth, it will suspend its observation mission for the next 10 hours and transmit the stored scientific data to three ground receiving stations at NASA’s Deep Space Communications Network. Those data will be delivered at high speeds, a transport network that paves the way for other data-intensive space missions in the future, including the James Webb Space Telescope.
The TESS data includes not only the brightness measurement every two minutes for each target star, but also the cosmic panorama of more than 20 million stars and 10 million galaxies taken every half hour. Patricia Boyd, an astronomer who is responsible for TESS recruitment at NASA, said: “It’s work will bring us valuable data and we expect this archive to last for years.”
The four cameras on this space telescope cover a 24-degree-wide, 96-degree wedge, equivalent to about 10,000 stars in the sky. TESS changes its viewing angle every two laps, and it covers the entire southern hemisphere of the sky during the first year of operation. As a result, TESS will detect 90% of the sky and will be able to detect 400 times more than the Kepler Space Telescope.
Astronomers are most interested in the stars around the pole, these stars directly above or below the zodiac plane. The stellar world in these regions will be the next major research goal of the James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope will attempt to infer the atmospheric chemistry of some of the transit alien planets. The Weber space telescope is expected to be launched in 2019.
George Ticker, chief scientist at the TESS project, said at MIT’s George Ricker: “TESS acts as a finder for Webb Space Telescope, and the specific stars discovered by TESS are in fact potential hosts for alien planets. TESS completed the survey of 50 small Mission objectives for planetary quality should not be difficult.Computer simulations show that the number of planets identified by the research team should exceed 500 before the first three years of ground-based observational events, rather than the 50 initially set.
In the end, the TESS project should be able to add as many as 20,000 new planets to the catalog of extraterrestrial planets. Most new planets will run around red dwarfs, which are about a quarter to one half the diameter of our sun, but they will be darker and cooler. About 70% of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, and they are also the main targets of the TESS project.
Rinehart, a project scientist, said: “The most exciting part of any new assignment is the surprising finding I really hope we can find something weird someday in the future, something we can not explain and need to think about I think we will certainly find out, but I do not know what it is. ”