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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.