Space Telescope Gets to Work

Our latest space telescope, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched in April. This

week, planet hunters worldwide received all the data from the first two months

of its planet search. This view, from four cameras on TESS, shows just one

region of Earth’s southern sky.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) captured

this strip of stars and galaxies in the southern sky during one 30-minute

period in August. Created by combining the view from all four of its cameras, TESS

images will be used to discover new exoplanets. Notable features in this swath

include the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and a globular cluster called NGC

104. The brightest stars, Beta Gruis and R Doradus, saturated an entire column

of camera detector pixels on the satellite’s second and fourth cameras.

Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS

The data in the images from TESS will soon lead to discoveries of

planets beyond our solar system – exoplanets. (We’re at 3,848 so far!)

But first, all that data (about 27 gigabytes a day) needs to be

processed. And where do space telescopes like TESS get their data cleaned up?

At the Star Wash, of course!

TESS sends about 10 billion pixels of data to Earth

at a time. A supercomputer at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley processes the raw

data, turning those pixels into measures of a star’s brightness.

And that brightness? THAT’S HOW WE FIND PLANETS! A dip in a star’s

brightness can reveal an orbiting exoplanet in transit.

TESS will spend a year studying our southern sky, then will turn

and survey our northern sky for another year. Eventually, the space telescope

will observe 85 percent of Earth’s sky, including 200,000 of the brightest and

closest stars to Earth.

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