Get ready for a flood of new exoplanets: TESS has already spotted two

[Judi Lynn]

We look at the design of NASA's latest planet hunter and why it was made that way.
JOHN TIMMER - 9/21/2018, 9:50 AM

NASA's successor to the Kepler mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is already paying dividends. The satellite was only launched in April and spent time undergoing commissioning and calibration. But it has now started its science mission, and researchers have already discovered two new planets.

These are expected to be the first of as many as 10,000 planets spotted by TESS. So we thought this was a good opportunity to take a careful look at the planet hunter's design, the goals that informed the design, and what its success should mean for our understanding of exoplanets.

Four eyes
The body of TESS is pretty simple, being composed largely of a fuel tank and thrusters. It has reaction wheels for fine control of its orientation and a pair of solar panels for power. The business end of TESS consists of a sun shield protecting not one but four telescopes. Instead of being able to focus on faint objects, the telescopes (each a stack of seven lenses above CCD imaging hardware) are designed to capture a broad patch of the sky.

TESS images a single area for roughly a month before moving on to the next. Over the course of a year, this will allow it to capture most of the sky in a single hemisphere; it will switch to the other hemisphere for its second year of observations. Should the hardware still be operational at the two-year mark, it will have imaged most of the sky, and a similar cycle will likely start again.

More:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/get-ready-for-a-flood-of-new-exoplanets-tess-has-already-spotted-two/

[Judi Lynn]

1. NASA telescope discovers two new planets five months after launch

Reuters
By Joey Roulette
,Reuters•September 20, 2018

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - A planet-hunting orbital telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system discovered two distant planets this week five months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, officials said on Thursday.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better known as TESS, made an early discovery of "super-Earth" and "hot Earth" planets in solar systems at least 49 light-years away, marking the satellite's first discovery since its April launch. TESS is on a two-year, $337 million mission to expand astronomers' known catalog of so-called exoplanets, worlds circling distant stars.

While the two planets are too hot to support life, TESS Deputy Science Director Sara Seager expects many more such discoveries.

"We will have to wait and see what else TESS discovers," Seager told Reuters. "We do know that planets are out there, littering the night sky, just waiting to be found."

More:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-telescope-discovers-two-planets-five-months-launch-001530659.html