Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess) Flashcards
What is TESS?
-NASA mission that will look for planets orbiting the
brightest stars in Earth’s sky.
-It was led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with seed funding from Google.
What is the mission?What is the name of orbit?
-Monitor 200,000 stars for signs of exoplanets. TESS will focus on stars that are 30 to 100 times
brighter than those Kepler examined.
-The elliptical orbit, called P/2
How it works?
will use transit method to detect exoplanets. It watches distant stars for small dips in
brightness, which can indicate that planet has passed in front of them. Repeated dips will indicate planet
passing in front of its star
What are exoplanets?
orbit around other stars located outside our solar system. Exoplanets are also called extrasolar planets
What is Kepler mission?
Launched in 2009, the Kepler mission is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-sized and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets.
Who was kepler?
best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books
Who was the predecessor of TESS?
Kepler space telescope, which discovered
the bulk of some 3,700 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years and is running out of fuel
