TESS Social Media Products
- Produced by:
- Scott Wiessinger
- View full credits
Looping animated gif of the unique orbit TESS will fly. At 13.7 days, it is exactly half of the Moon's orbit, which lets the Moon stabilize it. During the part of the orbit marked with blue, TESS will observe the sky, collecting science data. During the orange part, when TESS is closest to Earth, it will transmit that data to the ground.
Liquid water can’t pool on just any planet. For starters, a planet needs to be just the right temperature to support liquid water on its surface, which means that it can’t be too close or too far from its host star. This just-right region around a star is called the “habitable zone.” The newest planet hunter, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), will seek planets around other stars, and might just find some in that special region. Square animated gif.
Liquid water can’t pool on just any planet. For starters, a planet needs to be just the right temperature to support liquid water on its surface, which means that it can’t be too close or too far from its host star. This just-right region around a star is called the “habitable zone.” The newest planet hunter, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), will seek planets around other stars, and might just find some in that special region. Animated gif.
Liquid water can’t pool on just any planet. For starters, a planet needs to be just the right temperature to support liquid water on its surface, which means that it can’t be too close or too far from its host star. This just-right region around a star is called the “habitable zone.” The newest planet hunter, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), will seek planets around other stars, and might just find some in that special region. Animation.
Short video of TESS engaged in a staring contest with the brightest stars in the sky. TESS is watching for slight drops in brightness as a planet passes in front of its host star.
Music: "Fury" from Killer Tracks
Complete transcript available.
Short video of TESS engaged in a staring contest with the brightest stars in the sky. TESS is watching for slight drops in brightness as a planet passes in front of its host star.
Music: "Fury" from Killer Tracks
Complete transcript available.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle) [Lead]
Technical support
- Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
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NASA's New Planet Hunter: TESS
March 28, 2018, 9 a.m.
Read moreWatch an overview of the TESS mission.Music: from Killer TracksWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. || NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find undiscovered worlds around bright nearby stars, providing targets where future studies will assess their capacity to harbor life. TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth. Four wide-field cameras will give TESS a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of the entire sky. Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that TESS will observe one by one. The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky. The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away TESS will concentrate on stars less than 300 light-years away and 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets. The brightness of these target stars will allow researchers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water and other key molecules in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planets’ capacity to harbor life.