Successor to Kepler space telescope will go into space on April 16

NASA has announced that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, essentially the successor to the Kepler space telescope, will launch on April 16 on a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. The American space agency will use the telescope to search for exoplanets.

At this point, the final preparations for the launch from Cape Canaveral have begun. After launching on April 16, the space telescope will enter a highly elliptical orbit via a gravitational pendulum from the moon, orbiting the Earth in 13.7 days. In this special orbit, the satellite will reach its furthest point at a distance of 373,000 km from Earth. At the closest point to Earth, the distance will be 108,000km. When the telescope is close to Earth, the data is sent; this happens once per turn.

This track was chosen because it is very stable, eliminating the need for engine assistance to make corrections. In theory, the telescope can continue to function in this orbit for a thousand years. TESS will also be relatively unaffected by interference from the earth at a distance of 373,000 km.

The satellite has a total of four wide-angle cameras, which can view 85 percent of the observable space. This huge area is divided into 26 sectors, which will be examined one by one over the course of two years for the presence of exoplanets. This is done via the well-known transit method, which looks for a small dip in the brightness of stars, which could indicate a planet passing in front of the star.

The new space telescope is needed because the Kepler telescope launched in 2009 is running out of fuel. Kepler has focused on a portion of space containing some 150,000 stars, all more than a thousand light-years away from Earth. TESS will investigate a much larger area and will involve stars that are closer, up to 300 light-years from Earth. TESS’s targets are also about 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s. Presumably this will lead to the discovery of many new exoplanets.