TESS: NASA's Projected Space Telescope Designed To Find Another Earth

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the NASA's Kepler Telescope successor. Its mission is to help mankind find another habitable planet like Earth.

Join @NASA_TESS & @TESSatMIT on May 18 for the first TESS Q&A session hosted by the TESS science team @MIT #AskTESS pic.twitter.com/suhXVuRYK4

— NASA_TESS (@NASA_TESS) May 12, 2016

TESS will be introduced next year. Its capability to monitor the outer space is better than the Kepler, which identified over 2,000 exoplanets. Kepler can watch 100,000 stars in one patch each day. On the other hand, TESS can visualize the entire sky observing for brightest stars, according to Nature World News. It will be sent to outer space as soon as Kepler retires.

TESS has also the ability to examine the light from a variety of stars, this includes the M stars. These are the cooler and smaller stars that the solar-type stars and they are numerous in the galaxy, according to Kavli Foundation. It will also record the brightest and nearest main sequence stars accommodating transiting exoplanets.

The Kepler's successor is planned at Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It has seed funding from Google. TESS was among the 11 proposals chosen for NASA funding in September 2011. TESS together with Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, which was also chosen, will be launched in 2017.

NASA Goddard said that humans are already asking if they are alone in the universe. They further said that Tess is conceptualized to "seek worlds beyond the Solar System." It is achieved by examining the "entire sky for shadows of another Earth.  

The @NASA_TESS spacecraft team @OrbitalATK and @NASAGoddard are working hard to make TESS successful! #exoplanets! pic.twitter.com/Ga52jAjDKC — NASA_TESS (@NASA_TESS) April 28, 2016