NASA Cygnus spacecraft | Photo; Credit: Representative; Image

Washington: NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess aimed at detecting planets outside our solar system, is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on April 16. The mission is scheduled to launch no earlier around 4:02am on April 17 (India time) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA said on Wednesday. Tess is NASA's next step in the search for exoplanets, including those that could support life. Once in orbit, Tess will spend about two years surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to search for planets outside our solar system. Tess will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbour life.



With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement. Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 per cent of our entire sky. Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one. The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

Also read: InSight, NASA's Mars Exploration Program, to launch on May 5

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star's brightness. NASA's Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away.

TESS will look at stars which are classified in the twelfth apparent magnitude and brighter, while some of them are visible to the naked eye. The higher is the apparent magnitude, the fainter is the star. For comparison, most people can only see stars as faint as sixth magnitude in a clear dark sky and the faintest star as third magnitude in the Big Dipper ranks. Powerful telescopes such as NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can also further study these exoplanets in order to search for important characteristics, like the atmospheric composition and whether or not they could support life.</s>CAPE CANAVERAL — Look up at the sky tonight. Every star you see — plus hundreds of thousands, even millions more — will come under the intense stare of NASA's newest planet hunter.

Set to lift off on Monday night, the Tess spacecraft will prowl for planets around the closest, brightest stars. These newfound worlds eventually will become prime targets for future telescopes looking to tease out any signs of life.

Fairly small as spacecraft go, the 800-pound, 4 foot-by-5-foot Tess will ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Its eventual orbit of Earth will stretch all the way to the orbit of the moon.

It will be the most extensive survey of its kind from orbit, with Tess, a galactic scout, combing the neighborhood as never before.

“We're going to look at every single one of those stars,” said the mission's chief scientist George Ricker of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists expect Tess to find thousands of exoplanets — the term for planets outside our solar system.

“All astronomers for centuries to come are really going to focus on these objects,” Ricker said. “This is really a mission for the ages.”

NASA's astrophysics director, Paul Hertz, said missions like Tess will help answer whether we're alone — or just lucky enough to have “the best prime real estate in the galaxy.”

Tess — short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — is the heir apparent to the wildly successful Kepler Space Telescope, the pioneer of planetary census. Kepler's fuel tank is running precariously low after nine years of flight, and NASA expects it to shut down within several months.

Still on the lookout from on high, Kepler alone has discovered more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets. Even more candidates await confirmation.

The exoplanet count, from all observatories in space and on Earth over the past couple of decades, stands at more than 3,700 confirmed with 4,500 on the strong contender list.

About 50 are believed to potentially habitable. They have the right size and the right orbit of their star to support surface water and, at least theoretically, to support life.

Most of the Kepler-identified planets are so far away that it would take monster-size telescopes to examine them more. So astronomers want to focus on stars that are vastly brighter and closer to home — close enough for NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to scrutinize the atmospheres of planets lurking in their sun's shadows.

Powerful ground telescopes also will join in the detailed observations, as well as enormous observatories still on the drawing board.

MIT's Sara Seager, an astrophysicist who has dedicated her life to finding another Earth, imagines water worlds waiting to be explored. Perhaps hot super Earths with lakes of liquid lava. Maybe even rocky or icy planets with thin atmospheres reminiscent of Earth.

“It's not “Interstellar” or “Arrival.” Not yet anyway,” she said, referring to the recent hit science-fiction films.

The total mission price tag for Tess is $337 million.

“It packs a big punch, and that's the part that we're really excited about,” Ricker said.

Tess' four cameras will zoom in on red dwarf stars in our cosmic backyard — an average 10 times closer than the Kepler-observed stars. The majority of stars in the Tess survey will be 300 light-years to 500 light-years away, according to Ricker.

Red dwarfs are the most common stars around and, as their name implies, relatively small. They're no more than half the size of our sun. They're also comparatively cool in temperature. The celebrated Trappist-1 star, with at least seven Earth-size terrestrial planets, is an ultra-cool red dwarf that's just a little bigger than Jupiter.

So how do you spot a planet around such a small, faint star, from so far away?

A planet should cause a slight, brief dip in its star's brightness as it passes right in front. Tess will detect any such blips.

The spacecraft will survey almost the entire sky, starting with the Southern Hemisphere for a year, then the Northern Hemisphere for a year. Even more years of scanning could follow.</s>SpaceX’s launch team loaded super-chilled liquid propellants into a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday and fired the booster’s nine first stage engines at Cape Canaveral, marching toward liftoff Monday with a NASA observatory built to find planets around other stars in our galactic neighborhood.

The Falcon 9’s nine Merlin 1D booster engines ignited at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT) Wednesday as hold-down clamps kept the rocket firmly on Earth at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad. A plume of exhaust visible from nearby viewing points appeared at the launch pad, and SpaceX tweeted later Wednesday that the static fire test was complete.

The hold-down firing was a key milestone in the run-up to launch Monday of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, an approximately $337 million mission that will survey the sky in search of tell-tale dips in light from bright, nearby stars. The brief, slight reduction in brightness registered by TESS could be evidence of a planet passing in front of the star.

TESS will be the first NASA space science satellite to launch on a SpaceX rocket, and it’s the space agency’s second mission devoted to finding and cataloguing exoplanets.

NASA’s Kepler observatory, launched in March 2009, looked for planets around stars residing in a section of the sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, then expanded its survey to observe other parts of the sky in the ecliptic plane, the relatively flat imaginary plane where our solar system’s planets reside.

Kepler has found more than confirmed 2,652 exoplanets, and 2,724 candidate discoveries await follow-up observations before astronomers declare those detections as real planets, according to data published in NASA’s exoplanet archive. Looping around the sun in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, Kepler has discovered more than 70 percent of all the known exoplanets to date.

But TESS will look for exoplanets across 85 percent of the sky, giving astronomers a more three-dimensional survey of worlds lurking in other solar systems, focusing on bright stars that are in the same part of the Milky Way galaxy as the sun.

The new TESS observatory will “build upon the legacy of the Kepler mission, only it is going to focus on nearby bright stars that are sprinkled across the whole sky, and it’s going to help us answer a really important question: Which of our nearest stellar neighbors have planets?” said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist and TESS mission support scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

TESS carries four science cameras developed by MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Each camera contains a 16.8-megapixel sensor covering a field of view of 24-by-24 degrees, with the sensitivity to detect faint dips in star brightness and a coverage area wide enough to look at thousands of targets.

“The coverage of the TESS cameras is unprecedented in terms of the amount of sky that they can actually see at any given time, and also their ability to cover such a broad portion of the sky,” said George Ricker, the mission’s principal investigator from MIT. “The types of targets that TESS will allow us to find will enclose essentially all the bright nearby stars.”

Liftoff of TESS is scheduled for 6:32:07 p.m. EDT (2232:07 GMT) Monday from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral. The day’s launch window extends for 30 seconds.

TESS will launch into an egg-shaped preliminary orbit stretching as far as 155,000 miles (250,000 kilometers) from Earth, around 60 percent of the distance to the moon. Once deployed from the Falcon 9’s second stage, the roughly 815-pound (370-kilogram) spacecraft will fire thrusters to boost the farthest arc of its orbit to intercept the moon.

TESS will swing by the moon, using lunar gravity to slingshot toward the mission’s operating orbit. A final major maneuver will steer the satellite on a path taking it around the planet once every two weeks in a 2:1 resonance with the moon, with distances ranging between 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) and 233,000 miles (376,000 kilometers) from Earth.

“The Falcon 9 does a lot of the lifting for us, and then the moon does most of the rest of it,” said Robert Lockwood, TESS program director at Orbital ATK, which built the spacecraft.

The launch of TESS is timed to ensure the moon is in the right place in its orbit around Earth to allow the satellite to make its crucial lunar flyby. If Monday’s launch is delayed or scrubbed, launch opportunities will not be available on some days due to moon’s orbital dynamics.

But Ricker said Wednesday that TESS can blast off any day through April 21, before waiting for a new block of potential launch dates around the end of April.

Since arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in February, TESS has been fueled with maneuvering propellant for its rocket thrusters, and encapsulated inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing, the aerodynamic shell that will protect the spacecraft during the first few minutes of launch.

Now that the static fire test is complete, the TESS spacecraft and the rocket’s nose cone will be moved to SpaceX’s hangar at pad 40, where ground crews will install the payload once the Falcon 9 is lowered off its launch mount and rolled back inside.

The Falcon 9 rocket assigned to the TESS mission will fly with a new first stage booster, and SpaceX is expected to attempt to recover the stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for potential refurbishment and reuse. TESS will launch with the final newly-manufactured “Block 4” version of SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, before several upgrades will debut in a new “Block 5” version set to launch for the first time in early May.

It will take around two months for TESS to settle into its unusual orbit and complete post-launch testing. Then scientists will press the observatory into a two-year mission searching for exoplanets.

Ricker proposed the TESS mission to NASA in 2012, and the project won government funding the next year. Now the mission is days from launch.

“It feels wonderful in one way,” Ricker said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “It’s a little bit daunting because now that it’s really going to happen, we’ll see the rocket light and that will be all that we can conceivably do. We’ve done pretty much everything we can with the instruments and the spacecraft by delivering them here to Kennedy (Space Center) so that the launch preparations can really occur in earnest.”

Expect some new worlds added to the exoplanet count by the end of the year.

“I think there’s going to be a teething problem as there always will be with a new satellite,” Ricker said. “So it will probably be some time in the fall before we have some interesting results to share.”</s>Look up at the sky tonight. Every star you see — plus hundreds of thousands, even millions more — will come under the intense stare of NASA 's newest planet hunter.

Set to lift off early next week, the Tess spacecraft will prowl for planets around the closest, brightest stars. These newfound worlds eventually will become prime targets for future telescopes looking to tease out any signs of life.

It will be the most extensive survey of its kind from orbit, with Tess, a galactic scout, combing the neighborhood as never before.

"We're going to look at every single one of those stars," said the mission's chief scientist George Ricker of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists expect Tess to find thousands of exoplanets — the term for planets outside our solar system.

"All astronomers for centuries to come are really going to focus on these objects," Ricker said. "This is really a mission for the ages."

NASA's astrophysics director, Paul Hertz, said missions like Tess will help answer whether we're alone — or just lucky enough to have "the best prime real estate in the galaxy."

Tess — short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — is the heir apparent to the wildly successful Kepler Space Telescope , the pioneer of planetary census. Kepler's fuel tank is running precariously low after nine years of flight, and NASA expects it to shut down within several months.

Still on the lookout from on high, Kepler alone has discovered more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets. Even more candidates await confirmation.

The exoplanet count, from all observatories in space and on Earth over the past couple of decades, stands at more than 3,700 confirmed with 4,500 on the strong contender list.

About 50 are believed to potentially habitable. They have the right size and the right orbit of their star to support surface water and, at least theoretically, to support life.

Most of the Kepler-identified planets are so far away that it would take monster-size telescopes to examine them more. So astronomers want to focus on stars that are vastly brighter and closer to home — close enough for NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to scrutinize the atmospheres of planets lurking in their sun's shadows. Powerful ground telescopes also will join in the detailed observations, as well as enormous observatories still on the drawing board.

MIT's Sara Seager, an astrophysicist who has dedicated her life to finding another Earth, imagines water worlds waiting to be explored. Perhaps hot super Earths with lakes of liquid lava. Maybe even rocky or icy planets with thin atmospheres reminiscent of Earth.

"It's not "Interstellar" or "Arrival." Not yet anyway," she said, referring to the recent hit science-fiction films.

The total mission price tag for Tess is $337 million.

Fairly small as spacecraft go, the 800-pound, 4 foot-by-5-foot Tess (362-kilogram, 1.2 meter-by-1.5 meter) will ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Liftoff is scheduled for Monday evening. Its eventual orbit of Earth will stretch all the way to the orbit of the moon.

"It packs a big punch, and that's the part that we're really excited about," Ricker said.

Tess' four cameras will zoom in on red dwarf stars in our cosmic backyard — an average 10 times closer than the Kepler-observed stars. The majority of stars in the Tess survey will be 300 light-years to 500 light-years away, according to Ricker. (A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers.)

Red dwarfs are the most common stars around and, as their name implies, relatively small. They're no more than half the size of our sun. They're also comparatively cool in temperature. The celebrated Trappist-1 star, with at least seven Earth-size terrestrial planets, is an ultra-cool red dwarf that's just a little bigger than Jupiter.

So how do you spot a planet around such a small, faint star, from so far away?

A planet should cause a slight, brief dip in its star's brightness as it passes right in front. Tess will detect any such blips.

The spacecraft will survey almost the entire sky, starting with the Southern Hemisphere for a year, then the Northern Hemisphere for a year. Even more years of scanning could follow.

Scientists speculate that the habitable or so-called Goldilocks zone — the distance from a star where it's neither too hot nor too cold to support life, but just right with the potential for liquid water at the surface — should be much closer to red dwarfs than it is in our own solar system. The orbits of any planets in these systems should be fairly short.

NASA and others stress that Tess will not look for atmospheric or other signs of life; it can't do that.

That all-important job will be left to Webb, the next-generation successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that's grounded until at least 2020, and even bigger observatories yet to come.

If life, indeed, is detected out there — be it microscopic or some higher form — scientists like to think robotic explorers would be launched from Earth for closer inspections.

NASA project manager Jeff Volosin notes the technology for reaching these faraway worlds — or even communicating — doesn't yet exist.

"For me, just knowing they're there would be enough," Volosin said. "Just knowing that you're not alone."

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>New Delhi: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is all set to launch its next planet-hunting spacecraft on Monday, April 16 at 6:32 pm EDT (4.02 am IST, April 17). The spacecraft is scheduled to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission will study thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighbourhood.

The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits.

TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement.

Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of our entire sky.

Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star's brightness.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away</s>NASA already has some pretty powerful tools for detecting far-off worlds, but the latest and greatest is set to launch into space this coming Monday, April 16th. That’s when the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS for short, will head skyward from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The TESS spacecraft will be carried into orbit by SpaceX, and will ride one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets out of the atmosphere. Once up and running, the satellite will be used to detect exoplanets, which are planets outside of our own Solar System.

Researchers have produced a steady stream of exoplanet discoveries over the past few years. detecting many far-off worlds. Some are incredibly hostile due to their proximity to their host stars, while others are likely frigid balls of ice. Still others fall somewhere in the middle, and a handful may even be considered habitable by human standards.

Finding Earth-like planets outside of our own Solar System is a big priority for the human race, or at least it should be. Mankind has proven that it’s capable of dramatically altering a planet in a very short period of time, and while scientists and researchers have universally accepted human-driven climate change as a fact, the population of the world as a whole doesn’t seem all that interested in actually doing anything to stop it.

Of course, actually traveling to those would-be Earth replacements is a whole other challenge that we’ve not yet come close to achieving. For now, we’ll have to be satisfied with simply gazing into the depths of space, and the TESS satellite will certainly help with that.</s>CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A SpaceX Falcon 9 test fire Wednesday has cleared the way for the launch of NASA’s next-generation exoplanet hunter.

The commercial space company is set to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, on Monday at 6:32 p.m. from Cape Canaveral.

SpaceX conducted an engine test Monday afternoon, firing up the rocket's nine Merlin engines on the pad. The company said on Twitter it is now officially targeting Monday for launch.

After the launch, SpaceX will land its rocket's first stage core on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.

TESS, an MIT-led mission, is expected to discover thousands of Earth-size planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. The spacecraft will scan almost the entire sky searching for planets transiting, or passing, in front of their stars.

The mission will build on NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which is coming to an end as the probe runs out of fuel. TESS will scan an area 350 times greater than Kepler.

Planet hunting has exploded in the last 23 years since the first exoplanet discovery of 51 Pegasi b. After Kepler’s 2009 launch the spacecraft started finding multiplanet systems and lone exoplanets orbiting stars. To date, Kepler and its team have found more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets.

Dr. Daniel Batcheldor, who leads the physics and space sciences department at the Florida Institute of Technology, said the astronomy community long suspected we weren't the only system with planets orbiting its star.

"Why would our solar system be unique?" Batcheldor said. "We’ve been holding our breath, we’ve known for hundreds of years, because of Kepler we know there are billions of planets around stars."

Kepler confirmed that complex planetary systems, like ours, are also common.

Batcheldor said now it's just a question of finding out how interesting these planets are and if they can support life. Kepler and TESS have a different, but similar approach, to do that.

The Kepler spacecraft stared at one patch of sky, looking at hundreds of thousands of stars for a slight wink when a planet passes in front of the star.

TESS will look at the nearest and brightest stars in the whole sky while it's in a high elliptical orbit of Earth.

When NASA launches its James Webb Space Telescope in 2020 the two missions will work together to tell us more about these new worlds.

TESS will tell James Webb what to look at, and the powerful telescope can look for the planets' atmosphere traces.

When a planet passes in front of the star, the star's light passes through the planet's atmosphere, using transit spectroscopy, the infrared telescope will look at the characteristics of that light to determine if there are life-supporting elements, including water.

The data from TESS will influence future missions to come.

"TESS will show us where we need to point the next spacecraft," Batcheldor said.

Check back to watch the launch live at ClickOrlando.com/space.</s>On a mission to detect planets outside of our solar system, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT Monday, April 16. Prelaunch mission coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website Sunday, April 15, with three live briefings.

TESS is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets, including those that could support life. The mission is expected to catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.

NASA TV coverage is as follows:
• Jenn Burt, Torres postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( )
• Zach Berta-Thompson, assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder
• Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX
• Jessie Christiansen, staff scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech
• Mike McAleenan, weather officer with the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron
• This half-hour live show will discuss the TESS spacecraft, the science of searching for planets outside our solar system, and the launch from Cape Canaveral.

TESS will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The deadline for media accreditation for this launch has passed. For information about media accreditation, contact [email protected].

For the latest schedule of prelaunch briefings, events and NASA TV coverage, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/content/tess-prelaunch-briefings-and-events

Learn more about TESS at: https://www.nasa.gov/tess</s>NASA and SpaceX are putting the final touches to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission at Cape Canaveral, ahead of its launch window on Monday, April 16.

TESS is the next phase of the space agency’s search for planets outside our Solar System and aims to blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than 6.32 pm EDT. The event will be broadcast live on NASA TV.

NASA’s Kepler mission, which has confirmed the existence of over a thousand exoplanets and counting, has captured the public imagination with descriptions of worlds far outside our Solar System that may be capable of hosting alien life. The data it gathered over four years is still being analysed but the spacecraft, although still operational for now, has ended its primary world-hunting mission.

TESS hopes to pick up where Kepler left off by surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near to the Sun to search for transiting exoplanets. The research team behind the project, including scientists from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and MIT (along with dozens of other universities and institutes) are hoping that TESS will provide details of thousands more planet candidates to vastly increase the current known number of exoplanets. As of today, there are 3,758 known worlds out there, but just 53 are considered potentially habitable.

TESS’ job is not only to find more exoplanets, but also identify the most promising ones that orbit our nearest and brightest stars so that scientists can run follow-up studies that will perhaps finally find a habitable, or indeed inhabited, world.

“The stars TESS will study are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed, which will enable far easier follow-up observations with both ground-based and space-based telescopes. TESS will also cover a sky area 400 times larger than that monitored by Kepler,” NASA explains on the TESS mission pages.

Right now, TESS is awaiting the go at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40, where it has just been sealed inside the Falcon 9 payload fairing in preparation for its move to the launch pad.

NASA TV coverage will start at 11am on Sunday with an overview of the mission and prelaunch and science news. Coverage will continue on Monday with a half-hour live show at 10am, followed by the live launch itself beginning at 6pm ahead of blast-off at 6.32.</s>Washington, April 12 (IANS) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess aimed at detecting planets outside our solar system, is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on April 16.

The mission is scheduled to launch no earlier around 4.02 a.m. on April 17 (India time) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA said on Wednesday.

Tess is NASA’s next step in the search for exoplanets, including those that could support life.

Once in orbit, Tess will spend about two years surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to search for planets outside our solar system.

Tess will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbour life.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement.

Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 per cent of our entire sky.

Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away
NASA announces that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will be launched from Cape Canaveral on April 16.