This test image from one of the four cameras aboard the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, captures a swath of the southern sky along the plane of our galaxy. (NASA / MIT / TESS Photo)
TESS’ image was taken by one of its cameras with a two-second exposure. The picture is centered on the constellation Centaurus, with the edge of the dark Coalsack Nebula at upper right and the star Beta Centauri prominent along the lower edge.
The picture provides only a hint of what TESS will be seeing once it starts delivering science-quality images next month. When all four wide-field cameras are in operation, TESS’ images should cover more than 400 times as much of the sky.
The 1991 stamp that served as the rallying cry for the New Horizons Mission to Pluto is “updated” by members of the New Horizons science team on July 14, 2015, the day the spacecraft flew past Pluto. Principal investigator Alan Stern is at far left. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)
It took nine years for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to get to Pluto, and laying the groundwork for that history-making space mission here on Earth took nearly twice as long.
The drama and intrigue surrounding New Horizons during those decades, as chronicled in a new book titled “Chasing New Horizons: Inside the First Mission to Pluto,” might be enough for any planetary scientist. But Alan Stern — the book’s co-author, the mission’s principal investigator and arguably Pluto’s most ardent defender — is ready to do it all again.
Stern doesn’t expect his campaign to send an orbiter to Pluto to face quite as many challenges, now that the world knows so much more about the dwarf planet with a giant heart.
“I hope it’s a more straightforward process,” Stern told GeekWire. “First of all, there are now a lot more people who are interested in going back to Pluto. … Now that we’ve done the flyby, there isn’t a planetary scientist in the world that isn’t impressed.”
Last month, Stern and other New Horizons scientists signed onto a white papercalling for NASA to fund an in-depth study of potential Pluto orbiter missions. That grass-roots approach mirrors how the “Pluto Underground” campaign for New Horizons got started around a restaurant table in Baltimore, back in 1989.
“Chasing New Horizons,” written by Stern and astrobiologist David Grinspoon, traces the twists and turns that led from there to the piano-sized spacecraft’s launch in 2006 and its Pluto flyby in 2015.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lofts NASA’s TESS probe into space. (NASA via YouTube)
SpaceX has launched NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, kicking off a mission aimed at surveying nearly the entire sky for exoplanets.
The probe rose into space atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, sent up from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 6:51 p.m. ET (3:51 p.m. PT) today.
TESS was supposed to take off on April 16, but the launch teams said they wanted more time for guidance, navigation and control analysis. No issues were reported this time around.
Minutes after launch, SpaceX landed the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster on an autonomous drone ship named “Of Course I Still Love You,” hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. Over the past two years, such landings have become routine.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 sits on its launch pad. (SpaceX via YouTube)
NASA and SpaceX say they’ll take more time to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey System, or TESS, just to make sure the $337 million mission will be on the right track to hunt for planets beyond our solar system.
TESS’ liftoff aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket had been scheduled for today, but in an online update, NASA said “launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional guidance, navigation and control analysis.”
The launch was retargeted for April 18, with an anticipated liftoff time of 6:51 p.m. ET (3:51 p.m. PT).
The target of the “Sonar Calling” binary-coded radio transmission is a planet known as GJ273 b. (METI International Illustration / Danielle Futselaar)
Scientists and artists have banded together to beam coded radio transmissions toward a star that has a potentially habitable planet, just 12.4 light-years from Earth.
“Sónar Calling GJ273b” is the latest effort to communicate with aliens, 43 years since the first attempt was made using the 1,000-foot Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
The “Sónar Calling” messages were sent on three successive days, Oct. 16-18, from the 32-meter EISCAT radio antenna in Tromsø, Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle. Each transmission was directed at peak power of 2 megawatts toward a red dwarf star known as GJ273, or Luyten’s Star, in the constellation Canis Major.
Astronomers say Luyten’s Star harbors a planet that’s more than twice as massive as Earth, in an orbit where water could conceivably exist in liquid form. “Sónar Calling” aims to communicate with any radio-savvy life forms on that planet, called GJ273 b.
This artist’s impression shows the temperate planet Ross 128 b, with its red dwarf parent star in the background. (ESO Illustration)
A red dwarf star that was previously thought to be the source of a weird signal from aliens turns out to have a temperate Earth-sized planet, astronomers reported today.
The “Weird! Signal,” detected this summer, turned out to be nothing more than earthly interference. In contrast, the planet known Ross 128 b is very real, and it’s only 11 light-years away.
That makes it the second-closest exoplanet thought to have temperate conditions. What’s more, the planet orbits a star that’s less active than the closer-in planet, Proxima Centauri b, which could make Ross 128 b a better bet for life’s presence.
An artist’s impression shows the newly discovered belts of dust around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system. This sketch is not to scale — to make Proxima b clearly visible, it has been shown farther from the star and larger than it is in reality. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)
The ALMA Observatory’s array of antennas in Chile has picked up the thermal glow from cold clouds of dust surrounding the red dwarf star, which lies just 4.2 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. The clouds show up in a region that’s about one to four times as far away from the star as Earth is from our own sun.
There’s also evidence of a second dust belt farther out from the star. Such belts are thought to contain the remains of material left behind by the planet formation process, consisting of particles ranging in size from flecks of earthly dust to miles-wide asteroids.
Both belts are farther out than Proxima Centauri b, the planet whose detection was announced last year.
You can get an annotated view of Pluto from Google Maps. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Google)
If you zoom way, way out on Google Maps, you can now find your way around places like Sputnik Planum, Seville Mons, Aphrodite Terra and Damascus Sulcus.
Cassini project manager Earl Maize hugs Julie Webster, spacecraft operations team manager, at Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory just after the mission’s end. Program scientist Linda Spilker is at left, and Jim Green, the head of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, is at right. (NASA Photo / Joel Kowsky)
Before its destruction, the bus-sized Cassini spacecraft fought Saturn’s buffeting atmosphere to send back scientific data for even longer than NASA thought it would.
But the end was inevitable: Twenty years after its launch, and 13 years after its arrival at the ringed planet, the final signals from Cassini were received at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., at 4:55:46 a.m. PT today.
“I’m going to call this the end of mission,” Cassini project manager Earl Maize declared, during an early-morning webcast that was watched by tens of thousands. “Project manager, off the net.”
The end was pre-ordained days earlier, when a final maneuver put the spacecraft on a course to dive into Saturn’s upper atmosphere. NASA meticulously planned out the controlled descent to make sure there was no chance that Cassini could crash into one of Saturn’s moons, which are certain to be targets for future missions.
Among the still-image sequences are pictures showing Enceladus, an ice-covered moon that could conceivably harbor life, as it sets on the Saturnian horizon.
