NASA’s New Planet Hunter Reveals a Sky Full of Stars

NASA’s newest planet-hunting satellite — the Transiting

Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS for short — has just released its first science image using all

of its cameras to capture a huge swath of the sky! TESS is NASA’s next step in the

search for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

This spectacular image, the first released

using all four of TESS’ cameras, shows the satellite’s full field of view. It

captures parts of a dozen constellations, from Capricornus

(the Sea Goat) to Pictor

(the Painter’s Easel) — though it might be hard to find familiar constellations

among all these stars! The image even includes the Large and Small Magellanic

Clouds, our galaxy’s two largest companion galaxies.

The science community calls this image “first

light,” but don’t let that fool you — TESS has been seeing light since it

launched in April. A first light image like this is released to show off the

first science-quality image taken after a mission starts collecting science

data, highlighting a spacecraft’s capabilities.

TESS has been busy since it launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. First TESS needed to get into position, which required a push from the Moon. After nearly a month in space, the satellite

passed about 5,000 miles from the Moon, whose gravity gave it the boost it needed to get into a special orbit

that will keep it stable and maximize its view of the sky.

During those first few weeks, we also got a

sneak peek of the sky through one of TESS’s four cameras. This test image

captured over 200,000 stars in just two seconds! The spacecraft was pointed

toward the constellation Centaurus when it snapped this picture. The bright

star Beta

Centauri is visible at the lower left edge, and the edge

of the Coalsack

Nebula is in the right upper corner.

After settling into orbit, scientists ran a

number of checks on TESS, including testing its ability to collect a set of

stable images over a prolonged period of time. TESS not only proved its ability

to perform this task, it also got a surprise! A comet named C/2018 N1 passed through TESS’s cameras

for about 17 hours in July.

The images show a treasure

trove of cosmic curiosities. There are some stars whose

brightness changes over time and asteroids visible as small moving white dots.

You can even see an arc of stray light from Mars, which is located outside the

image, moving across the screen.

Now that TESS has settled into orbit and has

been thoroughly tested, it’s digging into its main mission of finding planets around other stars.

How will it spot something as tiny and faint as a planet trillions of miles

away? The trick is to look at the star!

So far, most

of the exoplanets we’ve found were detected by looking

for tiny dips in the brightness of their host stars. These dips are caused by

the planet passing between us and its star – an event called a transit. Over

its first two years, TESS will stare at 200,000 of the nearest and brightest stars

in the sky to look for transits to identify stars with planets.

TESS will be building on the legacy of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which also used

transits to find exoplanets. TESS’s target stars are about 10 times closer than

Kepler’s, so they’ll tend to be brighter. Because they’re closer and brighter,

TESS’s target stars will be ideal candidates for follow-up studies with current

and future observatories.

TESS is challenging over 200,000 of our

stellar neighbors to a staring contest! Who knows what new amazing planets

we’ll find?

The

TESS mission is led by MIT

and came together with the help of many

different partners. You can keep up

with the latest from the TESS mission by following mission updates.

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