https://www.9news.com.au/world/2018/04/13/13/49/space-x-to-carry-new-planet-hunting-nasa-telescope

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to be carried into orbit aboard a 70-metre tall Falcon 9 rocket next Monday.

TESS is replacing NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope Kepler which will run out of fuel over the next few months.

But TESS represents a big upgrade in surveying power. While Kepler only observed small patches of sky at a time, looking at more than 100,000 stars, TESS’ field of view is 400 times bigger.

Note from mollwollfumble. Although Kepler only observed small patches of sky, that was still a phenomenally large field of view by large telescope standards. So I am extremely keen to learn how TESS manages an even larger field of view.

This graph explains the problem that I tried to solve using Kepler data. I was actually looking for Jupiter-like planets.

When it’s announced again that “Earth-like exoplanet discovered”, it isn’t true. Because the orbital radius is too small. Venus is by far the most Earth-like planet ever discovered.

Whereas Kepler looked at two relatively small patches of sky out to a distance of 3,000 light years, TESS won’t be able to see any of the Kepler exoplanets because it’s limited to much brighter stars (as seen from Earth) out to 200 light years. That’s good, because closer is better.

TESS will acquire full frame images of a 24×96 degree field-of-view every 30 minutes. Each camera takes an image of a 24 * 24 degree patch of sky. There’s some way that allows it to flip hemispheres. Over a year it will be able to image the whole sky, I think.

Each camera is a refractor, just like a large telescopic camera (and not all that telescopic, about a 170 mm lens). There are seven lenses in each camera. Lenses up to 100 mm diameter (which is not big at all).

From https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/instrument.html

Looks good to me, though I wonder about stray light from the Sun, Moon and planets mucking up the observations.

Oh shit. Rule out TESS as a useful instrument.

TESS will not look for exoplanets with an orbital period > 10 days over almost all of the sky.
TESS will not look for exoplanets with an orbital period > 40 days anywhere in the sky.

This eliminates all possibility of finding Earth-like planets.

mollwollfumble said:

Oh shit. Rule out TESS as a useful instrument.

TESS will not look for exoplanets with an orbital period > 10 days over almost all of the sky.
TESS will not look for exoplanets with an orbital period > 40 days anywhere in the sky.

This eliminates all possibility of finding Earth-like planets.

What will it look for?

Peak Warming Man said:

mollwollfumble said:

Oh shit. Rule out TESS as a useful instrument.

TESS will not look for exoplanets with an orbital period > 10 days over almost all of the sky.
TESS will not look for exoplanets with an orbital period > 40 days anywhere in the sky.

This eliminates all possibility of finding Earth-like planets.

What will it look for?

Hot jupiters. And hopes to find about 17 Earth-size planets in close orbits around red dwarfs.

So when are they going to say: “OK, we’ve found enough planets. They’re obviously very common, so we can stop looking for them now.”

mollwollfumble said:

This graph explains the problem that I tried to solve using Kepler data. I was actually looking for Jupiter-like planets.

So our star system is a bit of an outlier in terms of slow orbits?

party_pants said:

mollwollfumble said:

This graph explains the problem that I tried to solve using Kepler data. I was actually looking for Jupiter-like planets.

So our star system is a bit of an outlier in terms of slow orbits?

No. Well yes, but not nearly as much of an outlier as the diagram suggests.

One lesson I learnt from studying the Kepler data is that the distribution of planets in orbits is almost exactly the same as the distribution of binary stars in orbits. The distribution of binary stars in orbits is better known, and there are quite a lot with large orbits. Proxima Centauri is not that much larger than Jupiter in angular diameter and has period of 547,000 years.

The problem is detection. Planets are almost all too faint to see directly against the light of the parent star. Small and more distant planets influence the motion of their star less, so are impossible to detect spectroscopically (by wobble). Small planets in distant orbits can be seen by eclipse, but the random inclination of the orbit means that more distant small planets are seen less frequently, and astronomers simply haven’t the patience to wait for a long enough time to see three eclipses by a planet in a distant orbit. For Earth-Size planets the observation is even more limited because Fourier analysis is used to find the eclipses and that requires heaps more orbits.

I did try to determine what the real; distribution of planets with orbital radius is. From raw observational data I made up this chart.

This is a correction of Kepler data for raw observational bias. Instead of the median planet orbit being close to 0.1 AU, it’s more like 0.6 AU. But even then, any information above about 0.5 AU is highly tentative.

In summary, the lack of data in the region where we find our solar system is mostly if not solely due to observational bias.

And……………….TESS is up and out there.

:)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-19/nasa-tess-spacecraft-embarks-on-quest-to-find-new-planets/9674818

NASA’s TESS spacecraft has embarked on a quest to find new worlds around neighbouring stars that could support life.

TESS rode a SpaceX Falcon rocket through the evening sky, aiming for an orbit stretching all the way to the moon.

The satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS — will scan almost the entire sky for at least two years, starting at the closest, brightest stars in an effort to find and identify any planets around them.

Hundreds of thousands of stars will be scrutinised, with the expectation that thousands of exoplanets — planets outside our own solar system — will be revealed right in our cosmic backyard.

Key points:

TESS is the successor to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope
It will scout for planets, especially those in the so-called Goldilocks zone
It should come within a few thousand kilometres of the moon in mid-May

So what happens to Kepler now? They leave it floating around? Bring it back down? Send it hurtling towards the sun?

Michael V said:

And……………….TESS is up and out there.

:)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-19/nasa-tess-spacecraft-embarks-on-quest-to-find-new-planets/9674818

NASA’s TESS spacecraft has embarked on a quest to find new worlds around neighbouring stars that could support life.

TESS rode a SpaceX Falcon rocket through the evening sky, aiming for an orbit stretching all the way to the moon.

The satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS — will scan almost the entire sky for at least two years, starting at the closest, brightest stars in an effort to find and identify any planets around them.

Hundreds of thousands of stars will be scrutinised, with the expectation that thousands of exoplanets — planets outside our own solar system — will be revealed right in our cosmic backyard.

Key points:

TESS is the successor to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope
It will scout for planets, especially those in the so-called Goldilocks zone
It should come within a few thousand kilometres of the moon in mid-May

Just watch it, the first stage was successfully recovered.
And stage 2 is currently putting TESS in the correct orbit.
This is high end technical stuff and it’s no wonder NASA has gone to Elon Musk to do it.

Michael V said:

And……………….TESS is up and out there.

:)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-19/nasa-tess-spacecraft-embarks-on-quest-to-find-new-planets/9674818

NASA’s TESS spacecraft has embarked on a quest to find new worlds around neighbouring stars that could support life.

TESS rode a SpaceX Falcon rocket through the evening sky, aiming for an orbit stretching all the way to the moon.

The satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS — will scan almost the entire sky for at least two years, starting at the closest, brightest stars in an effort to find and identify any planets around them.

Hundreds of thousands of stars will be scrutinised, with the expectation that thousands of exoplanets — planets outside our own solar system — will be revealed right in our cosmic backyard.

Key points:

TESS is the successor to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope
It will scout for planets, especially those in the so-called Goldilocks zone
It should come within a few thousand kilometres of the moon in mid-May

What we need is a planet spotter telescope that then sends a signal to each one

Peak Warming Man said:

Michael V said:

And……………….TESS is up and out there.

:)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-19/nasa-tess-spacecraft-embarks-on-quest-to-find-new-planets/9674818

NASA’s TESS spacecraft has embarked on a quest to find new worlds around neighbouring stars that could support life.

TESS rode a SpaceX Falcon rocket through the evening sky, aiming for an orbit stretching all the way to the moon.

The satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS — will scan almost the entire sky for at least two years, starting at the closest, brightest stars in an effort to find and identify any planets around them.

Hundreds of thousands of stars will be scrutinised, with the expectation that thousands of exoplanets — planets outside our own solar system — will be revealed right in our cosmic backyard.

Key points:

TESS is the successor to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope
It will scout for planets, especially those in the so-called Goldilocks zone
It should come within a few thousand kilometres of the moon in mid-May

Just watch it, the first stage was successfully recovered.
And stage 2 is currently putting TESS in the correct orbit.
This is high end technical stuff and it’s no wonder NASA has gone to Elon Musk to do it.

Still got the James Webb telescope to be launched

furious said:

So what happens to Kepler now? They leave it floating around? Bring it back down? Send it hurtling towards the sun?

It’s got a month or two of life left in it.

Mission duration
Planned: 3.5 years
Elapsed: 9 years, 1 month, 11 days

Kepler is in an Earth-trailing orbit around the Sun, which means it stays up there when it runs out of oomph.

May as well check sensor size of Kepler vs TESS.

Kepler has forty-two 50 × 25 mm (2 × 1 in) CCDs at 2200×1024 pixels each, possessing a total resolution of 94.6 megapixels, which at the time made it the largest camera system launched into space.

TESS has a brand new type of orbit that has never been used before. TESS will utilize a 2:1 lunar resonant orbit called P/2, an orbit that has never been used before (although IBEX uses a similar P/3 orbit). The highly elliptical orbit has a 373,000 km (232,000 mi) apogee, timed to be positioned approximately 90° away from the position of the Moon to minimize its destabilizing effect. This orbit should remain stable for decades, and will keep TESS’s cameras in a stable temperature range. The orbit is entirely outside the Van Allen belts to avoid radiation damage to TESS, and most of the orbit is spent far outside the belts. Every 13.7 days at its perigee of 108,000 km (67,000 mi), TESS will downlink the data it has collected during the orbit to Earth over a period of approximately three hours.

TESS is 16.8 megapixels, tiny compared to that of Kepler.

Why is it going near the moon?

Witty Rejoinder said:

Why is it going near the moon?

To put it into a lunar resonant orbit. There’s a diagram of how it gets to its final orbit somewhere. Here it is. 60 days for ascent and commissioning.

mollwollfumble said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Why is it going near the moon?

To put it into a lunar resonant orbit. There’s a diagram of how it gets to its final orbit somewhere. Here it is. 60 days for ascent and commissioning.

Yeah that looks about right.

Is it at all significant that all the instruments searching for intelligent life are pointing away from Earth?

Witty Rejoinder said:

Why is it going near the moon?

Looking for hidden nazi bases?

• Yeah that looks about right.

but why is the moon waxing gibbous?

AwesomeO said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Why is it going near the moon?

Looking for hidden nazi bases?

That was a reasonably decent movie

mollwollfumble said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Why is it going near the moon?

To put it into a lunar resonant orbit. There’s a diagram of how it gets to its final orbit somewhere. Here it is. 60 days for ascent and commissioning.

Thanks.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180421.html

mollwollfumble said:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180421.html

Golden shower.

Bubblecar said:

mollwollfumble said:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180421.html

Golden shower.

I don’t think that means what you think it means…