NASA’s upcoming project is set to focus on hunting Earth-sized planets nearby. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite also known as TESS, will search for planets by studying stars and observing shadows cast by transiting planets.
The respected program will compute for a planet’s size and the time it takes to orbit its star. This is primarily done due to the need to determine whether the planets are habitable or no.
Earth-sized planets are essentially small in size. Therefore, TESS only needs to observe small bright dwarf stars that exist a merely hundred light-years away from our globe.
The satellite is schedule to blast off to space in 2017 or 2018. Reports suggest, researchers are expecting to observe approximately 200,000 stars within its two-year lifespan, itself. If this turns out to be true, NASA will also be able to observe supernovae, binary stars and even supermassive black holes in the process.
