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Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

Complete transcript available.

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Over the course of these tests, TESS took images of C/2018 N1, a comet discovered by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) satellite on June 29. The comet, located about 29 million miles (48 million kilometers) from Earth in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus, is seen to move across the frame from right to left as it orbits the Sun. The comet’s tail, which consists of gases carried away from the comet by an outflow from the Sun called the solar wind, extends to the top of the frame and gradually pivots as the comet glides across the field of view.

In addition to the comet, the images reveal a treasure trove of other astronomical activity. The stars appear to shift between white and black as a result of image processing. The shift also highlights variable stars — which change brightness either as a result of pulsation, rapid rotation, or by eclipsing binary neighbors. Asteroids in our solar system appear as small white dots moving across the field of view. Towards the end of the video, one can see a faint broad arc of light moving across the middle section of the frame from left to right. This is stray light from Mars, which is located outside the frame. The images were taken when Mars was at its brightest near opposition, or its closest distance, to Earth.

These images were taken during a short period near the end of the mission’s commissioning phase, prior to the start of science operations. The movie presents just a small fraction of TESS’s active field of view. The team continues to fine-tune the spacecraft’s performance as it searches for distant worlds.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Dr. George Ricker of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.", "items": [], "extra_data": {} }, { "id": 325869, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13030/#media_group_325869", "widget": "Single image", "title": "", "caption": "", "description": "Animated gif of the unlabled comet sequence.

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Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center", "items": [ { "id": 245661, "type": "media", "extra_data": null, "title": null, "caption": null, "instance": { "id": 401295, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a013000/a013030/TESS_ObjectFinder.gif", "filename": "TESS_ObjectFinder.gif", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Alternate, flipped collection of TESS images including imagery from a second camera that shows more of the comet's tail. This animated gif is looped playing back and forth to highlight movement in the frame.Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center", "width": 800, "height": 450, "pixels": 360000 } } ], "extra_data": {} }, { "id": 325872, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13030/#media_group_325872", "widget": "Single image", "title": "", "caption": "", "description": "Alternate, flipped collection of TESS images including imagery from a second camera that shows more of the comet's tail.

Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center", "items": [ { "id": 245662, "type": "media", "extra_data": null, "title": null, "caption": null, "instance": { "id": 401296, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a013000/a013030/TESS_Comet2.gif", "filename": "TESS_Comet2.gif", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Alternate, flipped collection of TESS images including imagery from a second camera that shows more of the comet's tail.Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center", "width": 800, "height": 450, "pixels": 360000 } } ], "extra_data": {} }, { "id": 325873, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13030/#media_group_325873", "widget": "Basic text", "title": "For More Information", "caption": "", "description": "See [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-s-planet-hunting-tess-catches-a-comet-before-starting-science](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-s-planet-hunting-tess-catches-a-comet-before-starting-science)", "items": [], "extra_data": {} } ], "studio": "gms", "funding_sources": [ "NASA Astrophysics" ], "credits": [ { "role": "Producer", "people": [ { "name": "Scott Wiessinger", "employer": "USRA" } ] }, { "role": "Technical support", "people": [ { "name": "Aaron E. Lepsch", "employer": "ADNET Systems, Inc." } ] }, { "role": "Public affairs officer", "people": [ { "name": "Claire Saravia", "employer": "NASA/GSFC" } ] }, { "role": "Science writer", "people": [ { "name": "Jeanette Kazmierczak", "employer": "University of Maryland College Park" } ] }, { "role": "Scientist", "people": [ { "name": "Padi Boyd", "employer": "NASA/GSFC" } ] } ], "missions": [ "TESS" ], "series": [ "Astrophysics Features", "Narrated Movies" ], "tapes": [], "papers": [], "datasets": [], "nasa_science_categories": [ "Universe" ], "keywords": [ "Ast", "Asteroid", "Astrophysics", "Comet", "TESS" ], "recommended_pages": [], "related": [ { "id": 13661, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13661/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "NASA Missions Spot Comet NEOWISE", "description": "These images from ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory show comet NEOWISE as it approached the Sun in late June 2020. The instrument that produced this data is a coronagraph, which uses a solid disk to block out the Sun’s bright face, revealing the comparatively outer atmosphere, the corona, along with objects like comet NEOWISE. Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO || wide.00250_print.jpg (1024x576) [164.4 KB] || wide.mp4 (3840x2160) [72.2 MB] || wide.webm (3840x2160) [6.2 MB] || ", "release_date": "2020-07-10T09:50:00-04:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:44:51.300653-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 384086, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a013600/a013661/wisprinnerneowise20200705T020949E1_print.jpg", "filename": "wisprinnerneowise20200705T020949E1_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "An unprocessed image from the WISPR instrument on board NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows comet NEOWISE on July 5, 2020, shortly after its closest approach to the Sun. The Sun is out of frame to the left. The white streak near the upper left corner of the image is light reflected off a grain of dust that passed through the instrument’s field of view during the observation. The faint grid pattern near the center of the image is an artifact of the way the image is created. The small black structure near the lower left of the image is caused by a grain of dust resting on the imager’s lens. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab/Parker Solar Probe/Brendan Gallagher", "width": 1024, "height": 1092, "pixels": 1118208 } } ], "sources": [], "products": [], "newer_versions": [], "older_versions": [], "alternate_versions": [] }