TESS — Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Спутник наблюдения за транзитами экзопланет)- 19.04.18

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NASA TESS deployment

SciNews

Опубликовано: 18 апр. 2018 г.

(2:04)

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Launch Replays for SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket with TESS Planet Hunter

Space Videos

Опубликовано: 18 апр. 2018 г.

(16:08 )

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Репортёры

John Kraus‏ @johnkrausphotos 1 ч. назад

New tradition. Silly mission patch photo post-launch, post-patch retrieval

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https://blogs.nasa.gov/tess/2018/04/18/tess-spacecraft-embarks-on-planet-hunting-mission/

или

https://blogs.nasa.gov/kennedy/2018/04/18/tess-spacecraft-embarks-on-planet-hunting-mission/

TESS Spacecraft Embarks on Planet-hunting Mission

Anna Heiney
Posted Apr 18, 2018 at 9:01 pm


A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars upward after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Liftoff was at 6:51 p.m. EDT. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA will have a new tool in the search for habitable planets.

The agency's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite was delivered to space this evening aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch occurred right on time at 6:51 p.m. EDT following an uneventful countdown highlighted by excellent weather and healthy hardware.

"Liftoff of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying TESS, a planet-hunting spacecraft that will search for new worlds beyond our solar system," NASA Launch Commentator Josh Finch said as the rocket thundered away from the launch complex.

TESS will be the first space-based, all-sky surveyor to search for exoplanets – planets outside of our own solar system. However, the spacecraft isn't looking for just any planets. It's specifically searching for those that are Earth-like, and close enough to our own celestial neighborhood that scientists can study them further.

Спойлер

"We are thrilled TESS is on its way to help us discover worlds we have yet to imagine, worlds that could possibly be habitable, or harbor life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

How will it find these planets? Like the Kepler mission before it, TESS will use the transit method – that is, it will stare intently at the stars in a given section of the sky, watching for the telltale flicker of a passing (transiting) planet. (Learn more about TESS and the transit method on the TESS Overview.) Kepler, which launched in 2009, focused on one portion of the sky and sought to find Earth-like planets. TESS, on the other hand, will look for stars 30 to 100 times brighter than those observed by Kepler. It also will scan a far larger area.


In this view from a camera mounted on the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage, NASA's TESS spacecraft separates from the vehicle, beginning its mission. Image credit: NASA TV


But first, TESS had to get off the ground. After liftoff, the Falcon 9 rocket performed well, sending the spacecraft on its way to orbit. At 7:53 p.m., the twin solar arrays that will power the spacecraft successfully deployed.

"Wow, are we excited. We just had a perfect countdown and perfect launch of the TESS mission," said Tim Dunn of NASA's Launch Services Program. "The Falcon 9 continues to demonstrate what a reliable vehicle it has become," Dunn said.

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Over the course of several weeks, TESS will use six thruster burns to travel in a series of progressively elongated orbits to reach the Moon, which will provide a gravitational assist so that TESS can transfer into its 13.7-day final science orbit around Earth. After approximately 60 days of check-out and instrument testing, the spacecraft will begin its work.

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Jonathan McDowell‏Подлинная учетная запись @planet4589 12 мин. назад

The TESS Falcon 9 second stage has completed its escape burn; it will enter an 0.82 x 1.0 AU x 0.3 deg solar orbit on Apr 27

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https://www.orbitalatk.com/news-room/release.asp?prid=344

Orbital ATK-Built Planet-Hunting Satellite Successfully Deployed for NASA

TESS Satellite to Search for Nearby Extra-Solar Planets on Multi-Year Mission

Company Delivers 31st Science Spacecraft for NASA's Research Programs

Dulles, Virginia 18 April 2018 – Orbital ATK (NYSE: OA), a global leader in aerospace and defense technologies, announced that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), built by the company for NASA, was successfully launched today aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. As the first-ever exoplanet satellite to perform a survey of the entire sky, TESS will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to Jupiter-sized, orbiting a wide range of stellar types and in various orbital regimes. The principal goal of the TESS mission is to use four wide-field cameras to detect small planets around bright host stars in the solar neighborhood so that detailed characterizations of the planets and their atmospheres can be performed.

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Liftoff occurred at 6:51 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The satellite separated successfully from the launch vehicle 49 minutes into the mission. Orbital ATK completed the satellite's post-launch health checks and configuration activities in preparation for a series of in-space maneuvers, including a lunar gravitational assist, to reach its targeted highly-elliptical orbit. Once in-orbit testing has been completed, TESS will begin its initial two-year mission approximately 60 days after launch.

"The data from our first tests show TESS is in good health and performing as expected early in its mission," said Steve Krein, Vice President of Science and Environmental Satellite Programs at Orbital ATK. "TESS adds to our growing list of successful scientific space missions that have helped us study the Earth and Sun, explore the solar system, and probe the mysteries of the universe. This successful launch marks the 31st science spacecraft we have developed and built for NASA over the last 35 years, and continues to demonstrate Orbital ATK's expertise in delivering the high-quality satellites our customers expect."

Orbital ATK has a rich history of designing and manufacturing small space science satellites. From a small, low-cost astrophysics mission like GALEX, used to explore the origin and evolution of galaxies and stars, to Earth-imaging satellites such as the Landsat series, which have been monitoring surface changes for over 45 years, to the Dawn spacecraft, the first deep-space mission to orbit two interplanetary bodies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the company's robust spacecraft platforms and comprehensive engineering know-how have enabled many of these satellites to far exceed their design lifetimes.

TESS was built at Orbital ATK's Satellite Manufacturing Facility in Dulles, Virginia and is based on the company's LEOStar-2™ bus, a flight-proven and flexible satellite platform that accommodates a wide variety of missions. Continuing the company's legacy for delivering high-performance science and environmental spacecraft, several similar satellites are now in production for upcoming NASA missions that include the ICON heliophysics explorer, also built on a LEOStar-2 platform, as well as the Earth science ICESAT-2 and Landsat-9 satellites and the JPSS-2 weather spacecraft which use the larger LEOStar-3™ bus.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and managed by the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

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Официально, НАСА

Liftoff of TESS

NASAKennedy

Опубликовано: 18 апр. 2018 г.

 (2:55)

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Interview with NASA's Tim Dunn

NASAKennedy

Опубликовано: 18 апр. 2018 г.

Following the successful liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket and deployment of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, Tim Dunn of the agency's Launch Services Program speaks with Josh Finch of NASA Communications. Tess is the next step in the search for planets, also known as "exoplanets," located outside of the solar system and orbiting other nearby, bright stars.

(4:43)

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Jonathan McDowell‏Подлинная учетная запись @planet4589 12 мин. назад

TESS is 35900 km high, passing through the GEO belt. It's near the equator too, I'll have to calc its nearest approach to a GEO sat

20 сек. назад

Looks like TESS passed 2900 km from Luch-5A. Decent safety margin!

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http://spaceflight101.com/falcon-9-launches-tess-planet-hunter/

Falcon 9 Lifts TESS Exoplanet Hunter to Survey Earth's Cosmic Neighborhood for Habitable Worlds
 April 19, 2018

Photo: SpaceX

NASA's search for Earth-like planets around other stars took one major step forward Wednesday night when the agency's TESS exoplanet hunter received a smooth ride into a high-energy transfer orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 – setting out on two months of orbit trimming and a lunar flyby before beginning the first-ever all-sky survey looking for planets in Earth's cosmic neighborhood.

Спойлер

Packed into a compact spacecraft weighing only 362 Kilograms, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – TESS for short – will discover and catalog in excess of 10,000 new planets circling stars that are astronomically close to Earth to allow for follow-up characterization of their structure and atmospheric make-up in the continued search for planet's other than our own where life could theoretically be possible.

Sending TESS on its way toward a never-before-used Lunar Resonant Orbit fell to SpaceX's final new Block 4 Falcon 9 rocket, certified by NASA this January to handle a priority delivery such as TESS. Falcon 9 fired off fr om Cape Canaveral at 22:51 UTC on Wednesday, 6:51 p.m. local, under the power of its nine Merlin 1D engines that pushed rocket away fr om the Space Coast straight to the East.


TESS Separation – Photo: NASA TV

Accelerating beyond the speed of sound one minute after launch, Falcon 9 kept firing its booster for the first 149 seconds of the flight before the MVac-powered second stage took over for a two-burn mission. Stage 1 – a viable candidate for a future Dragon mission for NASA – flew a sub-orbital arc, re-fired a subset of its engines to hit the brakes and successfully landed atop SpaceX's Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship under the power of its center engine to be towed back to Cape Canaveral for re-flight as soon as this summer.

Tasked with the high-speed delivery of TESS, Falcon's second stage dropped the protective payload fairing and kept firing for five and a half minutes to lift the lightweight spacecraft into a preliminary Parking Orbit. The stack crossed the Atlantic Ocean & Africa before Stage 2 fired up again over Indian Ocean, hitting a peak speed of 37,500 Kilometers per hour when shutting down its engine after a 53-second burn. Loaded springs pushed the TESS spacecraft on its way 49 and a half minutes after liftoff and NASA confirmed its newest planet hunter was behaving well as it deployed its power-generating solar arrays and stabilized its orientation in space.


The fully-assembled TESS Observatory with its four star cameras still covered up – Photo: Orbital ATK

Getting TESS to where it needs to be is all but a trivial endeavor and Wednesday's launch only marked the start of a complex two-month up-and-down orbit ballet for the 1.5-meter tall spacecraft. All will depend on getting the timing right as TESS aims to thread the needle on May 17 for a critical lunar gravity assist that will pull the craft one large step closer to its operational orbit.

Falcon 9 only had a thirty second window to send TESS on its way – already timed to meet the lunar flyby, and the spacecraft will conduct a major boost when coming close to Earth again in six days to lift the high-point of its egg-shaped orbit to match the Moon's orbital distance. The next two orbits will be filled with correction maneuvers to refine the flyby path and another large maneuver comes after the Flyby to put TESS into a lunar resonant orbit of 108,400 by 376,300 Kilometers wh ere it circles the Earth twice for every orbit the Moon makes.


TESS in Launch Configuration – Photo: NASA Kennedy

If all goes well, TESS will achieve its final science orbit 57 days after launch – a specialized orbit that has not yet been used by a satellite to date. It was chosen for TESS because it offers a very quiet observation environment enabling the craft's four-camera instrument to stare at a sector of the sky uninterrupted for two weeks straight – logging the brightness of thousands of target stars to identify temporary dimming of stars as a tell-tale sign of a passing planet.

TESS will keep staring at the same slice of the sky for 27 days before stepping eastward to the next sector – covering the southern hemisphere in the first and the northern hemisphere in the second year of its mission to capture data across 85% of the sky. According to the latest statistical assessments, TESS will find close to 5,000 planets around stars in our neighborhood of the Milky Way including around 250 planets in the Earth-sized and Super-Earth categories. Another 10,000 or more planetary candidates are expected to be found around fainter stars.


TESS Observation Strategy – Images: TESS Project


Image: NASA

TESS builds upon the legacy of NASA's Kepler mission that launched in 2009 and so far has found 2,652 exoplanets, plus some 2,700 candidates still waiting for verification. But unlike Kepler which only monitors a small sliver of the sky and watches for planets around distant stars, TESS is optimized to cover a large piece of the sky and single-out which of our nearest stellar neighbors are host to planets. The hope is to identify a number of close planets that can be studied with Earth- and space-based telescopes to look at their structure and atmospheric composition to provide a conclusive assessment of their habitability.

The TESS instrument is optimized to detect planets around stars 30 to 100 times brighter than those studied by Kepler with the primary goal of identifying planets orbiting in the habitable zones around their host stars wh ere water can exist in its liquid form – a key requirement for life as we know it on Earth.


Actual Exoplanet Light Curves measured by the Kepler Mission – Image: NASA

Prime candidates from the exoplanet catalog created by TESS will undergo further scrutiny by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope aiming for launch in 2020; one of its primary objectives being the unprecedented characterization of exoplanets and their atmospheres.

Built by Orbital ATK and fitted with four science cameras from MIT, TESS can cover a 24 by 96-degree sector of the sky at any given time – an area 400 times larger than Kepler's field of view. Each of the four cameras comprises a seven-lens optical assembly, a spectral filter optimized for the near-infrared band of Red Dwarf stars and a 16.8-megapixel detector assembly with high sensitivity.

>> TESS Instrument Overview


TESS Detectors and Optics – Photos: MIT/TESS Project


TESS Instrument Deck – Image: NASA Goddard

By means of powerful onboard processing, TESS will be able to collect up to 15,000 "postage-stamp" images of target stars in each sector. Postage stamps will be collected with an image exposure of two minutes while full-sky images are collected every half hour. TESS will store the data it collects on board and send one burst of stored data once every two weeks when its orbit takes it sufficiently close to Earth to permit high data rates through NASA's Deep Space Network.

Getting the nod to lift TESS was a big deal for SpaceX as it represented the first medium-risk NASA science payload entrusted to the company and also marked the first time a dedicated NASA science mission was riding on Falcon 9 after two earlier deliveries – DSCOVR & Jason-3 – were for agency consortiums of which NASA represented only one part. Launching TESS required a Category 2 certification awarded by NASA's Launch Services Program to the Falcon 9 rocket in January and the TESS launch contract specified SpaceX to use a new Block 4 vehicle.

>> Falcon 9 Launch Vehicle Overview


Photo: NASA

Wednesday's launch was the 53rd mission of a Falcon 9 vehicle, the 33rd for the Falcon 9 Full Thrust family and the seventh Falcon 9 of 2018 as SpaceX keeps up a high pace of launches to surpass its 2017 record of 18 successful missions. Out of seven missions performed this year so far, four Falcon 9 rockets have flown with previously used first stages.

Wednesday's launch came two days after an initial launch attempt for TESS was halted before the countdown progressed inside T-3 hours. SpaceX said additional GNC (Guidance, Navigation and Control) analysis was necessary and, as a result, pushed the launch by two days. It is understood that additional modeling of the second stage's flight profile was part of open items discussed toward Monday's T-0.

Falcon 9 was lowered to a horizontal position after Monday's attempt was abandoned and was back in its vertical position by Wednesday morning after all open items had been resolved, according to a status upd ate given to all involved parties.


Photo: SpaceX

Towering 70 meters over its Atlantic-side launch pad, Falcon 9 was cleared to head into another countdown, starting with a detailed set of checkouts while teams buttoned up the launch vehicle and SLC-40 launch pad.

Launch Controllers in two control rooms at the Cape were able to award Falcon 9 a clean bill of health after a multi-hour checkout campaign and weather was also cooperating for Wednesday's near-instantaneous launch slot – allowing computers to be handed control for the 70-minute automated countdown sequence encompassing the fast-paced tanking operation and a last set of reconfigurations on the two-stage rocket.

The process of loading over 500 metric tons of sub-cooled Liquid Oxygen and chilled Rocket Propellant 1 into Falcon 9 ended just two minutes before launch when the vehicle had already switched to battery power, armed its autonomous safety system, and conditioned the nine Merlin 1D engines for ignition. Tanks pressurized to flight level after the Launch Director voiced a final GO at T-45 seconds and Falcon 9 soared to life at T-3 seconds, ramping up to a launch thrust of nearly 700 metric ton-force.


Photo: NASA TV

Falcon 9 lifted off at precisely 22:51:31 UTC, the opening of a 30-second window constrained by TESS' tight timing requirements to intercept its lunar flyby window one month after taking flight. Balancing vertically for the first 15 seconds, Falcon 9 then swung on its planned departure to the East in order to begin its high-energy delivery.

Consuming nearly 2,500 Kilograms of propellant per second, Falcon 9 pushed through the sound barrier at T+64 seconds and stepped off the gas while going through the area of Maximum Dynamic Pressure one minute and 16 seconds into the mission. The first stage then throttled back up and fired until T+2 minutes and 29 seconds, accelerating the vehicle to a speed of 1.95 Kilometers per second.


Photo: NASA TV


Photo: SpaceX Webcast

Stage separation – accomplished with four pneumatic pushers – sent the two Falcon 9 stages into different directions at an altitude of 75 Kilometers. While the first stage was to remain on a sub-orbital arc, the second stage fired up its 95,000-Kilogram-force MVac engine two minutes and 39 seconds after launch to lift TESS into orbit.

Wednesday's launch was the first SpaceX booster recovery mission since Falcon Heavy's debut in early February. Four Falcon 9 missions since then discarded their first stages in the ocean after flight testing maneuvers – three were by choice as SpaceX cleared out its inventory before the arrival of Block 5 while one was by necessity due to rough seas in the recovery area.

Separating from the second stage after flying a very lofted trajectory, the first stage made a quick U-turn to point its engine section toward the direction of travel for a 19-second, three-engine boostback maneuver, starting two minutes and 45 seconds after launch while the booster was still mid turn. This partial boostback controlled the downrange travel distance toward the OCISLY Drone Ship  – essentially moving recovery closer to shore to shorten the travel time for the Drone Ship.

Speeding back toward Earth, Booster 1045 re-started three of its engines for a 21-second Entry Burn six minutes and 29 seconds after launch. Having hit the brakes, the 47-meter long booster reversed through the sound barrier and employed its four actuated grid fins while descending through the atmosphere to steer toward the coordinates of the OCISLY Drone Ship, holding position 300 Kilometers from the SLC-40 launch pad.


Stage 1 in final approach for landing – Photo: SpaceX Webcast


Photo: SpaceX Webcast

The booster fired up its center engine at T+7 minutes and 50 seconds for the landing burn, designed to arrest its vertical velocity at the moment it made contact with the Drone Ship. Four fold-out landing legs deployed in the final seconds of the rocket-powered descent and Booster 1045 made a bullseye touchdown on its floating landing pad after a round trip time of eight minutes and 21 seconds – bringing SpaceX's total to 24 successful booster landings split evenly between land- and sea-based recoveries.

Provided all goes well with Booster 1045's return to Port Canaveral in the next few days, it is a good candidate for quick refurbishment toward re-flight as early as late June on the next Dragon mission headed to the International Space Station.

While the first stage was going through the motions of its return, the MVac powered second stage initially continued a steep climb – dropping the 13-meter long payload fairing three minutes and one second into the flight when passing 105 Kilometers in altitude. SpaceX planned to put Fairing 2.0 through an experimental return toward a mock landing target in the Atlantic Ocean in order to continue working on the precision of the landing recovery sequence by means of thrusters and auto-steering parachutes that will ultimately guide the fairing halves into nets deployed via sea-going vessels.

Carrying its lightest payload to date, the second stage then leveled off to build speed until reaching a 250-Kilometer parking orbit, shutting down eight minutes and 20 seconds into the flight after a short burn of five minutes and 41 seconds.


Photo: NASA TV

Next was a lengthy coast phase of 35 minutes to allow the second stage to continue flying east across the Atlantic Ocean and cross over Africa to reach the correct position for its second burn in order to appropriately position the apogee location of the resulting orbit. Re-start was confirmed at T+43 minutes and 10 seconds and the second stage was programmed to fire for around 53 seconds until reaching a planned Supersynchronous Orbit of 248 by 270,461 Kilometers, inclined 29.6 degrees.

SpaceX launch controllers reported a good orbit was achieved and TESS sailed off at T+49 minutes, setting sail on two months of orbital trimming and instrument checkouts before its sky surveying mission can begin. A good deployment of the spacecraft's two power-generating solar arrays was confirmed by NASA, indicating TESS was behaving as planned after being se t free from the Falcon 9.


TESS Phasing Loop Design – Image: TESS Project

The mission's next milestone, after undergoing initial systems activation, will be when reaching the peak of its elliptical orbit when a brief burn of its 22-Newton main engine will slightly lift the orbit's perigee to ensure its stays well clear of the atmosphere. This will also act as a calibration firing for the thruster before the mission's first big burn on the first perigee passage, designed to lift the orbit's apogee to match lunar distance to get ready for the critical lunar intercept after another two and a half orbits.

Although TESS will capture a treasure trove of data via its two-year primary mission, the spacecraft has been designed to last up to 20 years and the specialized orbit has also been simulated to be sufficiently stable for that period of time. However-long TESS may last, its scientific legacy is likely one for the ages as the exoplanets it'll discover will be prime observation candidates for decades, if not centuries to come.

For the Falcon 9 second stage, the day was not done at TESS separation as SpaceX planned to dispose the upper stage into a heliocentric orbit by firing its engine a third time to escape Earth's gravitational influence.

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[Чебурашка]

Фалькон-9 мог закинуть TESS сразу на финальную орбиту без всяких манёвров у Луны..

[Apollo13]

Чебурашка пишет:
Фалькон-9 мог закинуть TESS сразу на финальную орбиту без всяких манёвров у Луны..

Если калькулятор не врет до апогея 108000 км лететь больше 20 часов. Сомневаюсь что даже Центавр столько проживет.

Initial GTO orbit: 250.00 x 108000.00 x 28.00
  speed at perigee: 10668.461 m/s
  speed at apogee: 617.603 m/s
  revs/day: 0.583
  days/rev: 1.714
  rev time: 41h08m

И когда в 2014 заключали контракт на запуск планировался Фалкон-9 1.1.

[Димитър]

" калькулятор "
Аполо13, как это работает?  Попробовал, не получается... 

[Apollo13]

Димитър пишет:
" калькулятор "
Аполо13, как это работает? Попробовал, не получается...

Ввести перигей, апогей, наклонение. Дальше оно само.

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https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-planet-hunter-on-its-way-to-orbit

April 19, 2018
RELEASE 18-026

NASA Planet Hunter on Its Way to Orbit


A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars upward after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Liftoff was at 6:51 p.m. EDT. TESS will search for planets outside of our solar system. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. The satellite will survey the nearest and brightest stars for two years to search for transiting exoplanets.
Credits: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched on the first-of-its-kind mission to find worlds beyond our solar system, including some that could support life.

TESS, which is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. At 7:53 p.m., the twin solar arrays that will power the spacecraft successfully deployed.

Спойлер

"We are thrilled TESS is on its way to help us discover worlds we have yet to imagine, worlds that could possibly be habitable, or harbor life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "With missions like the James Webb Space Telescope to help us study the details of these planets, we are ever the closer to discovering whether we are alone in the universe."


NASA's next planet-hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on April 18, 2018. TESS will search for new worlds outside our solar system for further study.
Credits: NASA Television

Over the course of several weeks, TESS will use six thruster burns to travel in a series of progressively elongated orbits to reach the Moon, which will provide a gravitational assist so that TESS can transfer into its 13.7-day final science orbit around Earth. After approximately 60 days of check-out and instrument testing, the spacecraft will begin its work.

"One critical piece for the science return of TESS is the high data rate associated with its orbit," said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge. "Each time the spacecraft passes close to Earth, it will transmit full-frame images taken with the cameras. That's one of the unique things TESS brings that was not possible before."

For this two-year survey mission, scientists divided the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will use four unique wide-field cameras to map 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky during its first year of observations and 13 sectors of the northern sky during the second year, altogether covering 85 percent of the sky.

TESS will be watching for phenomena called transits. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its star from the observer's perspective, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star's brightness. More than 78 percent of the approximately 3,700 confirmed exoplanets have been found using transits.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft found more than 2,600 exoplanets, most orbiting faint stars between 300 and 3,000 light-years from Earth, using this same method of watching for transits. TESS will focus on stars between 30 and 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.

"The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come," said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It's the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research."

Through the TESS Guest Investigator Program, the worldwide scientific community will be able to conduct research beyond TESS's core mission in areas ranging from exoplanet characterization to stellar astrophysics, distant galaxies and solar system science.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. George Ricker, of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, serves as principal investigator for the mission. TESS's four wide-field cameras were developed by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA's Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

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NASA_TESS‏Подлинная учетная запись @NASA_TESS 7 ч.

Over the course of the next several weeks, [url=https://twitter.com/NASA_TESS]@NASA_TESS will conduct a series of burns (6 of them) to reach its final science orbit. This will include a lunar fly-by on 17 May 2018 at 06:31:52.180 UTC. The lunar fly-by distance will be at approximately 8000 km (altitude).

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SpaceX‏Подлинная учетная запись @SpaceX 4 ч. назад

More photos from yesterday's Falcon 9 launch of @NASA_TESS

 → http://flickr.com/spacex 

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/04/19/all-sky-surveyor-launched-from-cape-canaveral-on-the-hunt-for-exoplanets/

All-sky surveyor launched fr om Cape Canaveral on the hunt for exoplanets
April 19, 2018 | Stephen Clark


A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT) with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: Walter Scriptunas II/Spaceflight Now

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, built to find planets around other stars that are close enough for detailed follow-ups by future telescopes, launched Wednesday into a unique high-altitude orbit on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket fr om Cape Canaveral.

The $337 million mission is the latest in a line of space-based observatories designed for exoplanet research, building on discoveries made by NASA's Kepler telescope and laying the foundation for missions set for launch over the next decade.

TESS lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral's Complex 40 launch pad at 6:51:31 p.m. EDT (2251:31 GMT) Wednesday, heading for an arcing elliptical orbit that will take the spacecraft more than two-thirds the distance to the moon.

Спойлер

The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket thundered into a clear evening sky over Florida's Space Coast with 1.7 million pounds of thrust, departing to the east over the Atlantic Ocean, wh ere the launcher's first stage descended to a SpaceX landing platform parked a few hundred miles east of Cape Canaveral.

While the first stage made its away back to Earth for refurbishment and reuse — potentially in late June on SpaceX's next space station resupply flight — the Falcon 9's second stage engine drove the 798-pound (362-kilogram) TESS spacecraft into a transfer orbit that was targeted to range from a low point of 154 miles (248 kilometers) as far as 168,000 miles (270,000 kilometers) from Earth at its highest point.

SpaceX and NASA officials said the Falcon 9 rocket achieved an on-target orbit before deploying TESS less than 50 minutes after liftoff, while the spacecraft soared over the Indian Ocean west of Australia.

A few minutes later, engineers confirmed TESS extended its power-generating solar panels to a span of 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) tip-to-tip. The satellite started charging its batteries as designed, while ground controllers at Orbital ATK, which built the TESS spacecraft, ran it through a post-launch health check.

Officials said TESS was performing as expected late Wednesday evening.

"We are thrilled TESS is on its way to help us discover worlds we have yet to imagine, worlds that could possibly be habitable, or harbor life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate in Washington. "With missions like the James Webb Space Telescope to help us study the details of these planets, we are ever the closer to discovering whether we are alone in the universe."


SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral's Complex 40 launch pad with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: SpaceX

After a five-day checkout of the spacecraft, ground controllers will kick off procedures to switch on TESS's cameras, with "first light" from the observatory expected next week.

TESS will scan around 85 percent of the sky during its two-year mission, and astronomers predict the mission could detect as many as 20,000 undiscovered planets lurking around stars in our solar neighborhood.

Carrying four 16.8-megapixel cameras, TESS will look for dips in light coming from some 200,000 relatively bright, pre-selected nearby stars. The periodic blots, if found to occur in a repeating pattern, are a tell-tale sign of a planet transiting between its host star and the telescope.

The craft's four imaging cameras each cover a square in the sky that measures 24 by 24 degrees, wide enough to fit the constellation Orion into the field of view of a single camera. The cameras together will simultaneously survey a 24-degree by 96-degree strip of the sky for 27 days, then move on to stare at another sector of the sky.

TESS will search for exoplanets from a unique orbit in a 2:1 resonance with the moon, following a loop that takes it as close as 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) from Earth, and farther than the moon at its most distant point.

Such an orbit has three key advantages: It's stable, using lunar gravity to maintain its shape without the need for maneuvers; It passes close enough to Earth to transmit full frame images through a high-speed Ka-band downlink; It keeps TESS away from the damaging effects of the Van Allen radiation belts.

"The orbit takes 13.7 days to go around once, so we do actually two orbits for every lunar orbit," said Padi Boyd, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who serves as TESS's deputy project scientist. "It swings out very far past the moon at its farthest point, then when it comes back in towards the Earth it's going very quickly and that's when it dumps the data.

"So we're only going to get one data dump every 13.7 days, and then it takes a tremendous software effort to analyze those images and look for these transit signals," Boyd told CBS News in an interview.


An illustration of the phasing orbits to be employed by TESS on the way to its final science orbit, labeled P/2 in this image. Credit: NASA

With the stability of the mission's final science orbit, TESS has enough fuel to keep up its exoplanet hunt for as long as 20 or 30 years, assuming NASA funding and spacecraft components remain robust.

Reaching TESS's unique observing orbit, known as a P/2 orbit, requires time and finesse.

The compact spacecraft's on-board propulsion system will raise TESS's orbit in the coming weeks to set up for a flyby of the moon May 17.

TESS will slingshot by the moon at a distance of around 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers), using gravity to reshape its orbit, increasing the satellite's orbital perigee, or low point, to the final planned altitude of around 67,000 miles. After the lunar flyby, the high point of the satellite's elongated orbit will stretch well beyond the moon, and another thruster firing will nudge TESS into its final science orbit in mid-June.

The collection of science data is scheduled to begin in July, with the first year of TESS's two-year campaign aimed at stars in the southern sky. In 2019, TESS will start looking at stars in the northern sky.

George Ricker, who leads the TESS science team at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said the exoplanet surveyor is a "finder scope" for the Webb telescope and huge ground-based observatories.

TESS will primarily look at M-dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than the sun, and make up the majority of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Also called red dwarfs, the stars that are TESS's focus have not been thoroughly investigated to determine whether they harbor their own solar systems.

The observatory's wide-angle cameras are only about 4 inches (10 centimeters) in size, giving TESS a tiny fraction of the light-collecting power of a telescope like Webb, which is scheduled for launch in 2020 with a 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror.


A view of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite before launch. The observatory's four cameras are located at the top of the spacecraft. Credit: NASA

The planets found by TESS will be prime candidates for further study by JWST because they will be relatively nearby. The bulk of the more than 2,600 planets discovered by Kepler are located between 300 and 3,000 light-years away — too far for composition measurements with current technology — while TESS will look at stars 10 times closer and 100 times brighter.

In addition, Kepler has only pointed at certain parts of the sky, while TESS will take a broader look.

"You can go out on a dark night, and you can see 6,000 stars or so in the sky with your naked eye," Ricker said. "We're going to look at every single one of those stars."

Approximately 20 million stars will be visible by TESS's light-sensitive cameras, including targets up to a million times fainter than observable with the naked eye, Ricker said. Around 200,000 of those stars are "pre-selected" by the TESS science team for special emphasis because of their proximity and brightness.

The TESS observatory will "build upon the legacy of the Kepler mission, only it is going to focus on nearby bright stars that are sprinkled across the whole sky, and it's going to help us answer a really important question: Which of our nearest stellar neighbors have planets?" said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist and TESS mission support scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Each of TESS's cameras house four custom-built red-sensitive CCD detectors designed and developed by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

"I think it's fair to say that the CCDs that TESS is flying are the most perfect CCDs that have ever been flown on any science mission, NASA or otherwise," Ricker said.


Artist's concept of the field-of-view from TESS's four cameras, which will scan the sky in slices as illustrated in this image. Credit: NASA

"TESS is a survey machine, and it's going to find the very best planets for us to follow-up, and among that category are these small rocky planets, transiting small red dwarf stars," said Sara Seager, deputy science director on the TESS mission at MIT.

Data from TESS will tell astronomers the size of each planet. With that information, they can use other techniques like radial velocity measurements to determine each planet's mass and density.

"Measuring masses is a really big deal because the planet mass is really definitive," Seager said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. "Is it a rocky planet like Earth with a thin atmosphere? Is it a giant planet like Jupiter or Neptune that has a huge gas envelope?"

Ricker said he expects TESS to find between 500 and 1,000 planets that are between one and three times the size of Earth. Up to 20,000 planets the size of Neptune or Jupiter could be discovered by TESS, he said.

That would grow the number of known planets beyond our solar system by factor of five or more, but it's not all about expanding the exoplanet catalog.

"The focus that TESS has on finding systems associated with bright stars means that they will be much easier to follow-up," Ricker said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. "Once you find that a transiting system exists, it's something that you'll want to come back to and study more and more as improved instruments, satellites and telescopes become available because this is going to be the benchmark for future research."

That's wh ere the James Webb Space Telescope becomes a crucial tool for astronomers seeking to learn more about the nature of faraway exoplanets. JWST will be able to probe the atmospheres of some of these worlds, learning about their chemical make-up and searching for evidence that the planets might be habitable.

Once launched, the huge, expandable observatory "will be able to look for characteristic signatures of materials in the atmospheres of those planets ... and something that's potentially a biogenic signature," Ricker told Spaceflight Now. "Of course, that takes a lot of care and a lot of work. TESS can only point the way to these are the best targets that you should be focusing on with Webb."

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John Kraus‏ @johnkrausphotos 5 ч. назад

Falcon 9's Merlin 1D engines lift it and #NASA's #TESS from SLC-40 yesterday evening. What an incredible display of power! @elonmusk #SpaceX

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