NASA Goes Out On A Hunt Mission For Aliens

Footage of NASA's TESS - Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is on its two year mission. A NASA mission, set to launch by June will continue to try to answer the question “Are we alone?”. TESS short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is designed to look for planets beyond our solar system. Over two years, it will scan the entire sky using four cameras created by MIT and monitor 200,000 + stars for dips in brightness, which would indicate a planet passing in front of the star.TESS is expected to identify over 2,000 exoplanets hundreds of which could be Earth-sized. The data will then allow other missions to further explore which planets could support life.Show more

The principal goal of the TESS mission is to detect small planets with bright host stars in the solar neighborhood, so that detailed characterizations of the planets and their atmospheres can be performed. ESS will monitor the brightness of more than 200,000 stars during a two year mission, searching for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Transits occur when a planet's orbit carries it directly in front of its parent star as viewed from Earth. TESS is expected to catalog more than 1,500 transiting exoplanet candidates, including a sample of ∼500 Earth-sized and ‘Super Earth’ planets, with radii less than twice that of the Earth. TESS will detect small rock-and-ice planets orbiting a diverse range of stellar types and covering a wide span of orbital periods, including rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.