This month, the Falcon 9 rocket, part of Elon Musk's SpaceX project, launched into space. The launch took place at the Florida base in Cape Canaveral, Falcon 9 took off together with the transiting exoplanetary research satellite TESS. If you haven't seen the pictures from the launch yet, it would be a shame to miss them.
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Images from our gallery come from the server SpaceFlightNow. The mission of the exoplanetary research satellite TESS will be to focus on the search for stars in the close neighborhood of the Sun and to search for an object suitable for subsequent investigation with the help of powerful telescopes. One of them will be the James Webb Space Telescope, whose launch is planned for 2020.
TESS launched into space on Wednesday, April 18, together with the Falcon 9 rocket. This is far from the first case of cooperation between SpaceX and NASA, but it is the first time that a special NASA telescope is part of the rocket. It is supposed to be the successor of the Kepler telescope, with the help of which most of the known exoplanets have been discovered so far. During its two-year mission, TESS should explore about 85% of the sky, and scientists predict that it could detect up to 20 as yet undiscovered planets in the neighborhood of our solar system. The telescope includes four 16,8-megapixel cameras.
Exploring the worlds of tomorrow
The TESS telescope will primarily focus on so-called "red dwarfs", smaller and cooler than the Sun, and which make up the majority of stars in the Milky Way galaxy - because these objects have a high probability of having a sufficient number of other interesting planets in their vicinity. Planets discovered by TESS will be the first candidates for more detailed investigation.
"When you go outside on a starry night, you can see about six thousand stars in the sky with the naked eye. We will look at every single one of them," explains George Ricker, head of the TESS research team. Almost 20 million stars will be visible with light-sensitive cameras, including those not visible to the naked eye.
"TESS builds on the legacy of the Kepler mission by focusing on nearby bright stars and helping us answer one very important question: 'Which of our nearest stellar neighbors have planets?'" explains astrophysicist Elisa Quintana.
According to Ricker's expectation, TESS could discover 500 to 1000 planets one to three times the size of Earth. This could significantly increase the number of known planets outside our solar system. "TESS's focus on finding systems associated with bright stars means that it will be much easier to track them," says Ricker. "Once you know these systems exist, you'll want to keep coming back and studying them more and more because you'll have improved instruments, satellites, and telescopes as a basis for future research."
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The huge, expandable observatory will, once launched, "be able to look for signatures of the materials of these planets in the atmosphere ... obviously it's going to be a lot of care and a lot of work," Ricker acknowledges.
