![]() ![]() The MIT TESS team has subjected the cameras to extended, rigorous testing in conditions designed to replicate the environment they will be subjected to in space. ![]() Furthermore, the imaging properties change as the temperature of the cameras changes. “The instantaneous field of view of the TESS cameras, combined with their area and detector sensitivity, is unprecedented in a space mission.”Ī complication found in very fast wide-angle lenses, such as those in the TESS cameras, is that the image sharpness varies over the field of view, and there is no single focus, as found in more conventional cameras. “The TESS four-camera ensemble instantaneously views a section of sky that is more than 20 times greater than that for the Kepler mission,” Ricker says. The instruments have just been inspected by NASA and a group of independent technical experts, as part of a formal Systems Integration Review of all TESS components, which they passed successfully.Įach of the four cameras has a field of view that is more than five times greater than that of the camera flown on the earlier planet-hunting Kepler space observatory mission, according to TESS Principal Investigator George Ricker, senior research scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute. The four cameras have been mounted onto the camera plate, and successful operation with the flight computer has been demonstrated. The cameras were recently delivered to Dulles, Virginia-based aerospace company Orbital ATK, where they will be integrated onto the satellite. The overall process of designing, fabricating, and testing the cameras at MIT has taken four years to complete. ![]() The satellite’s four cameras, developed by researchers at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, are equipped with large-aperture wide-angle lenses designed to survey the entire sky.Įach camera consists of a lens assembly containing seven optical elements and a detector with four charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor chips. It will search for temporary drops in brightness caused by an exoplanet passing in front of its host star, as viewed from Earth. “The scientific community is eagerly awaiting the launch of TESS and the first data release in 2018,” says Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences at MIT and deputy lead of the TESS Science Office.ĭuring its two-year mission, TESS, which is being led by MIT and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will monitor the brightness of more than 200,000 stars. It will detect small rock-and-ice planets orbiting a diverse range of stars, including rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars. TESS is expected to catalog a sample of around 500 Earth-sized and “super Earth” planets, or those with radii less than twice that of Earth. These will range from Earth-sized planets to much larger gas giants. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), due to launch in 2018, will travel through space, identifying more than 20,000 extrasolar planets. A NASA mission designed to explore the stars in search of planets outside of our solar system is a step closer to launch, now that its four cameras have been completed by researchers at MIT. ![]()
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