NASA announced on Friday April 5 its plans to grant $200 million worth of funds to MIT's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) for an expansive search for planets beyond our solar system.
The TESS satellite works by using a number of telescopes and other instruments that allow it to detect a planet's density, size and atmosphere. Its purpose is to find Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars.
"TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission," project leader George Ricker said in an MIT press release. "It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth."
The initiative is not the first on NASA's part to search for extraterrestrial life. NASA's Kepler satellite, which is currently studying 100,000 star systems, has been able to detect a large number of planets. The TESS project, however, will be more far-reaching, not being limited to one specific area of the sky.
"The selection of TESS has just accelerated our chances of finding life on another planet within the next decade," planetary scientist Sara Seager said in the press release.
In addition to TESS, NASA also has plans to launch the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an International Space Station instrument that will be used to observe X-rays from stars. By measuring X-ray timing, NICER will examine the states of matter inside neutron stars to understand their compositions.
"The Explorer Program has a long and stellar history of deploying truly innovative missions to study some of the most exciting questions in space science," NASA's John Grunsfeld said in a statement. "With these missions we will learn about the most extreme states of matter by studying neutron stars and we will identify many nearby star systems with rocky planets in the habitable zone for further study by telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope."
