NASA launches spacecraft to search for extraterrestrial life
The most ambitious search for life in space in human history is set to begin on April 16 when NASA launches its newest planet-hunting spacecraft into space.
NASA is readying a $337 million dishwasher-sized spacecraft to expand the exploration of planets beyond our solar system, especially nearby ones that are similar in size to Earth and could harbor life.
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to launch on April 16 at 22:32 GMT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Its main goal over the next two years is to scan more than 200,000 of the brightest stars for signs of planets orbiting them.
NASA predicts TESS will discover 20,000 planets outside the Solar System, including more than 50 Earth-sized planets and about 500 planets at least twice the size of Earth.
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| Simulation image of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. |
"It will orbit the nearest, brightest stars," AFP quoted scientist Elisa Quintana from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
“We may even be able to find planets around stars that we can see with the naked eye,” she added. “In a few years we will be able to look and know which stars in the sky have planets. This is the future.”
TESS is designed to be the successor to the Kepler space telescope, NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, which launched in 2009. Kepler is now aging, low on fuel, and nearing retirement. For four years, Kepler monitored 150,000 stars in a patch of sky.
Equipped with four advanced cameras, TESS will scan an area 350 times larger, covering 85% of the sky, in just the first two years of its mission.
“On average, the stars TESS observes are 30-100 times brighter and 10 times closer than the stars Kepler observed,” said Jenn Burt from the University of Massachusetts.
By focusing on planets tens to hundreds of light years away from Earth, TESS will be a stepping stone to breakthroughs in space exploration, according to Jeff Volosin, who directs the TESS project from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
“Hopefully one day, in the coming decades, we can determine the potential for life to exist outside the solar system,” Volosin said.
