NASA’s latest mission is to deploy a new space telescope to help find new planets. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will launch come April 16th. The launch will mark the beginning of a two-year mission. For the first sixty days prior to this two-year mission, the TESS will undergo tests and adjustments. TESS will be help to build off of data already collected by the Kepler Space Telescope, which has been in orbit for nine years and has confirmed over 2,600 exoplanets.
“TESS is opening a door for a whole new kind of study,” says Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We’re going to be able study individual planets and start talking about the differences between planets. The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come. It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research.”
