A conceptual image of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Image Credit: MIT

NASAs ongoing hunt for exoplanets has entered a new phase as NASA officially confirmed that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is moving into the development phase. This marks a significant step for the TESS mission, which will search the entire sky for planets outside our solar system (a.k.a. exoplanets). Designed as the first all-sky survey, TESS will spend two years of an overall three-year mission searching both hemispheres of the sky for nearby exoplanets.

Previous sky surveys with ground-based telescopes have mainly picked out giant exoplanets. In contrast, TESS will examine a large number of small planets around the very brightest stars in the sky. TESS will then record the nearest and brightest main sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which will forever be the most favorable targets for detailed investigations. During the third year of the TESS mission, ground-based astronomical observatories will continue monitoring exoplanets identified by the TESS spacecraft.

This is an incredibly exciting time for the search of planets outside our solar system, said Mark Sistilli, the TESS program executive from NASA Headquarters, Washington. We got the green light to start building what is going to be a spacecraft that could change what we think we know about exoplanets.

During its first two years in orbit, the TESS spacecraft will concentrate its gaze on several hundred thousand specially chosen stars, looking for small dips in their light caused by orbiting planets passing between their host star and us, said TESS Principal Investigator George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..

Artistic representations of known exoplanets with any possibility to support life. Image Credit: Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo.

All in all, TESS is expected to find more than 5,000 exoplanet candidates, including 50 Earth-sized planets. It will also find a wide array of exoplanet types, ranging from small, rocky planets to gas giants. Some of these planets could be the right sizes, and orbit at the correct distances from their stars, to potentially support life.

The most exciting part of the search for planets outside our solar system is the identification of earthlike planets with rocky surfaces and liquid water as well as temperatures and atmospheric constituents that appear hospitable to life, said TESS Project Manager Jeff Volosin at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Although these planets are small and harder to detect from so far away, this is exactly the type of world that the TESS mission will focus on identifying.

Now that NASA has confirmed the development of TESS, the next step is the Critical Design Review, which is scheduled to take place in 2015. This would clear the mission to build the necessary flight hardware for its proposed launch in 2017.

After spending the past year building the team and honing the design, it is incredibly exciting to be approved to move forward toward implementing NASAs newest exoplanet hunting mission, Volosin said.

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NASAs Next Exoplanet Hunter Moves Into Development