Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA’s planet-hunting satellite TESS locates its first exoplanet

By
A hot gas giant exoplanet around a star with stellar oscillations

NASA’s planet-hunting satellite, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), was launched last year to search for exoplanets — particularly those which could potentially support life. The satellite will observe 400,000 stars across the sky and select a target from the new TESS Habitable Zone Star Catalog.

Recommended Videos

The catalogue is a list of 1,822 stars within TESS’s range which have Earth-sized planets in orbit whose planets receive a similar amount of radiation from their star as we do from our Sun. This includes a group of 408 stars which have planets around the size of Earth and similar radiation which can be observed in just one transit.

“Life could exist on all sorts of worlds, but the kind we know can support life is our own, so it makes sense to first look for Earth-like planets,” lead author Lisa Kaltenegger, professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute, said in a statement. “This catalog is important for TESS because anyone working with the data wants to know around which stars we can find the closest Earth-analogs.”

And TESS’s search is already paying off. This week, astronomers analyzing data from TESS announced they have discovered a Saturn-sized planet.

A “hot Saturn” passes in front of its host star in this illustration. Astronomers who study stars used “starquakes” to characterize the star, which provided critical information about the planet. Illustration by Gabriel Perez Diaz, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

TESS’s first planetary discovery is the “hot Saturn” planet TOI 197.01. That means it’s a planet about the same size as Saturn but located close to its star, so it has a very high temperature. In fact, this planet is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in just 14 days.

“This is the first bucketful of water from the firehose of data we’re getting from TESS,” Steve Kawaler, a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University, said in a statement.

The researchers are already planning for what other objects they could search for with TESS. “The thing that’s exciting is that TESS is the only game in town for a while and the data are so good that we’re planning to try to do science we hadn’t thought about,” Kawaler said. “Maybe we can also look at the very faint stars — the white dwarfs — that are my first love and represent the future of our sun and solar system.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
NASA cracks open its first sample from an asteroid, foiling two sticky screws
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx curation engineer, Neftali Hernandez, attaches one of the tools developed to help remove two final fasteners that prohibited complete disassembly of the TAGSAM (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) head that holds the remainder of material collected from asteroid Bennu. Engineers on the team, based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, developed new tools that freed the fasteners on Jan. 10.

NASA returned its first sample of an asteroid to Earth last year, landing a sample collected from asteroid Bennu in the Utah desert in September. Researchers were able to extract 70 grams of material from the canister that had been carried back to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, making this the largest asteroid sample ever brought to Earth. The scientists involved knew there was more material inside the mechanism, but getting at it proved difficult -- until now, as NASA has announced it has now managed to open up the troublesome mechanism.

You might think it would be an easy job to unscrew a canister and dump out the material inside, but extraction was a lengthy and technical process. That's because the focus was on preserving as much of the precious sample as possible, trying not to let any of the particles get lost. The issue was with two of the 25 fasteners that held the sample inside the collection mechanism.  The mechanism is kept inside a glove box to prevent any loss, and there were only certain tools available that worked with the glove box. So when the fasteners wouldn't open with the tools they had, the team couldn't just go at them with any other tool.

Read more
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft sends back its first image of a star field
This illustration, updated as of June 2020, depicts NASA’s Psyche spacecraft.

NASA has shared the first images taken by its Psyche mission, which launched in October to study a strange metal asteroid located in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft, which is still on its long journey, is expected to make its arrival at the asteroid in 2029 and is currently between the orbits of Earth and Mars. But it is already testing out its instruments by taking a test image using its two cameras and sending it back to Earth, in a process called first light.

The image captured by Psyche's cameras shows a field of stars in the constellation Pisces. It is a mosaic made from the total of 68 images taken by the two cameras, with its first camera Imager A taking images for the left side and its second camera imager B taking images for the right side.

Read more
NASA laser communications test riding with Psyche sends back its first data
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 8, 2022. DSOC’s gold-capped flight laser transceiver can be seen, near center, attached to the spacecraft.

An experimental test of laser communications riding along with the Psyche mission has sent back its first data, in a demonstration of the use of laser communications for deep space missions. The Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC experiment, is attached to the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently heading toward an asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter following its launch last month.

Communications for NASA deep space missions are handled by the Deep Space Network, a network of antennae at three sites around the world that primarily use radio. But laser communications could offer 10 to 100 times as much bandwidth, so NASA wants to experiment with using this technology in situations like transferring science data.

Read more