The Great Smoky Mountain Journal
Source:
Tuesday, January 01, 2019 02:47 PM
Vanderbilt Plays Role In NASA's Tess Spacecraft's Attempt To Find New Planet Life Across Galazy
Tess rode a SpaceX Falcon rocket through the evening sky, aiming for an orbit stretching all the way to the moon.
The satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess — will scan almost the entire sky for at least two years, staring at the closest, brightest stars in an effort to find and identify any planets around them. Tess will carry a map of sorts that was developed at Vanderbilt University. Physics and astronomy professor Keivan Stassun headed up the development team at Vanderbilt.
“The TESS mission represents a dream come true for me and for the many scientists and engineers who have worked on the mission,” Stassun said. “Our ambition is to not only detect hundreds of Earth-like worlds in other solar systems, but to find them around our closest neighboring solar systems.”
Hundreds of thousands of stars will be scrutinized, with the expectation that thousands of exoplanets — planets outside our own solar system — will be revealed right in our cosmic backyard. These planets often orbit red dwarf stars like Barnard's Star, which was named after a Vanderbilt astronomer who discovered it.
Rocky and icy planets, hot gas giants and, possibly, water worlds. Super-Earths between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. Maybe even an Earth twin. The Vanderbilt University team has been working since 2012 to narrow down the field of stars visible to Tess. About 470 million stars have been reduced to the 250,000 most likely to have a planet capable of bearing life like on Earth.
“In a few years’ time, we may very well know that there are other habitable planets out there, with breathable atmospheres,” Stassun said. “Of course, we won’t yet know whether there is anything, or anyone, there breathing it. Still, this is a remarkable time in human history and a huge leap for our understanding of our place in the universe.”
“The sky will become more beautiful, will become more awesome” knowing there are planets orbiting the stars we see twinkling at night, said NASA’s top science administrator, Thomas Zurbuchen.
Discoveries by Tess and other missions, he noted, will bring us closer to answering questions that have lingered for thousands of years.
Does life exist beyond Earth? If so, is it microbial or more advanced?
But Tess won’t look for life. It’s not designed for that. Rather, it will scout for planets of all sorts, but especially those in the so-called Goldilocks or habitable zone of a star: an orbit where temperatures are neither too cold nor too hot, but just right for life-nourishing water.
The most promising candidates will be studied by bigger, more powerful observatories of the future, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in another few years as the heir to Hubble. These telescopes will scour the planets’ atmospheres for any of the ingredients of life: water vapor, oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide.
“Tess will tell us where to look at and when to look,” said the mission’s chief scientist, George Ricker of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tess is the successor to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, on its last legs after discovering a few thousand exoplanets over the past nine years.
Astronomers anticipate more than doubling Kepler’s confirmed planetary count of more than 2,600, once Tess’ four wide-view cameras begin scientific observations in early summer. Unlike Tess, Kepler could only scour a sliver of the sky.
