We think we’ve got a spacecraft that is ready to kick ass once it’s up in orbit,” said Stephen Rinehart, the TESS project scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Putting stuff up in space is not without risk, but at this point there is nothing more we can do. Those are believed the most likely to feature rocky surfaces or oceans, and are thus considered the best candidates for life to evolve, as opposed to gas giants like Jupiter or Neptune.Īstronomers said they hope TESS will help catalogue about 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study. It could end up discovering thousands of such planets, mission officials have said, and Nasa expects that hundreds of them could be Earth-sized or “super-Earth”-sized – no larger than twice as big as our home planet. This orbit will be the first of its kind for an artificial satellite. Roughly the size of a refrigerator with solar-panel wings and equipped with four special cameras, the satellite will settle into a long, looping orbit around Earth and the Moon in June, at which point it can begin its planet-hunting mission in earnest. TESS is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,700 exoplanets documented by astronomers during the past 20 years and is about to run out of fuel. To date, the company has pulled off such first-stage touchdowns 23 times during Falcon 9 launches, with about half of the boosters coming down on ‘drone ships’ and the other half returning to dry land. Once the delivery of the satellite into space has been completed, SpaceX will attempt to land the first stage of the two-stage Falcon 9 on a robotic ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. The Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida later today, starting the clock on a two-year, $337m mission in one of astronomy’s newest fields of exploration. Nasa is launching a new satellite on a SpaceX rocket that will aim to discover more exoplanets that might harbour life.

Spacex launches nasa planet-hunting s