WASHINGTON – In about 45 days, NASA’s TESS hunting satellite launched into Earth orbit April 18 will begin its mission – searching the solar system and up to 50 million light years away for extraterrestrial life.
There are high expectations at NASA that an Earth-like planet will be found – perhaps even hundreds of them.
Vladimir Airapetian, a senior astrophysicist at Heliophysics Science Division of the Goddard Space Flight Center and a research professor at American University, believes the satellite is capable of finding a planet with life.
He is just one of some 100 experts who recently discussed the project’s potential at the Environments and Terrestrial Planets Symposium.
“If life emerged on Earth, then the early evidence for complex cellular life implies that the origin of life was a rapid event developing at a time scale of less than 100 million years occurring as soon as conditions became favorable,” he said. “This argument may suggest that the origin of life on other Earth-like worlds with similar chemistry, availability of water and energy sources must be a pretty common process on terrestrial type exoplanets around solar-type stars.”
Airapetian, like other colleagues at NASA, is eagerly awaiting the massive amount of data expected to be gathered and transmitted – especially about the possibility of life on other planets. He is very eager regarding starting the investigation and finding the possibility of life in the planets.
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The earlier Kepler satellite discovered some 2,300 planets with similarities to Earth, according to NASA. But there are much higher hopes for TESS, which as 95 percent vision when it comes to the scanning the possible Earth-like planets.
NASA scientists are expecting to find an estimated of 20,000 new worlds, says Airapetian.
The acronym TESS stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is what NASA calls “the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life.”
The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets.
TESS scientists expect the mission will catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. Of these, approximately 300 are expected to be Earth-sized and super-Earth-sized exoplanets, which are worlds no larger than twice the size of Earth. TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting our nearest and brightest stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies.
TESS will survey the entire sky over the course of two years by breaking it up into 26 different sectors, each 24 degrees by 96 degrees across, says NASA. The powerful cameras on the spacecraft will stare at each sector for at least 27 days, looking at the brightest stars at a two-minute cadence. From Earth, the moon occupies half a degree, which is less than 1/9,000th the size of the TESS tiles.
The stars TESS will study are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed, which will enable far easier follow-up observations with both ground-based and space-based telescopes. TESS will also cover a sky area 400 times larger than that monitored by Kepler.
“TESS is helping us explore our place in the universe,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters. “Until 20 years ago, we didn’t know of any planets beyond our own solar system. We’ve expanded our understanding of our place in the universe, and TESS will help us keep expanding.”
The cameras can detect light across a broad range of wavelengths, up to infrared. This means TESS will be able to look at many nearby small, cool red dwarf stars and see whether there are exoplanets around them. Red dwarf stars have been found to host exoplanets within the habitable zone, and many astronomers believe they could be the best candidate for hosting Earth-size exoplanets with conditions suitable for life.
“One of the biggest questions in exoplanet exploration is: If an astronomer finds a planet in a star’s habitable zone, will it be interesting from a biologist’s point of view?” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge. “We expect TESS will discover a number of planets whose atmospheric compositions, which hold potential clues to the presence of life, could be precisely measured by future observers.”
