SpaceX has launched a satellite to look for exoplanets that could be hospitable to life.
TESS (Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite) was launched on 18 april 2018 atop a Falcon9 rocket.
TESS is headed towards a highly elliptical orbit between the Earth and th moon. This orbit is very stable, letting the spacecraft remain relatively unaffected by orbital debris and space radiation, as well as allowing for easy communications with mission team members on the ground during the close passes to Earth.
It will scan the sky for exoplanets for at least two years, starting at the closest, brightest stars in an effort to find and identify any planets around them.
Some of them could be hospitable for life, this means that they could have the same features as our Planet (and not a a sign of life).
It will scout for planets of all sorts, but especially those in the so-called Goldilocks or habitable zone of a star: an orbit where temperatures are neither too cold nor too hot, but just right for life-nourishing water.
There is other conditions for life development like:
- existence of an atmospher
- existence of a magnitic field
- stability of the solar system
- the size of the star...
TESS will monitor the brightness of more than 200,000 stars, waiting to observe tiny dips in starlight known as transits. Indeed when a planet make a revolution around its star and pass between the star and us, the light spectrum of the star will be modified. This technique is currently use to establish the existence of a planet. These dips will be recorded by TESS' four ultrasensitive cameras.
In addition, some confirmed TESS planets should be close enough to Earth to be studied in detail by other instruments, including NASA's $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2020.
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