SpaceX has successfully launched Kepler Space Telescope successor
SpaceX launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite on Thursday night with a Falcon 9 rocket. This new NASA space telescope has been successfully decoupled and is expected to discover far more exoplanets than the Kepler space telescope.
SpaceX confirmed that TESS was successfully decoupled to achieve the desired elliptical orbit around the earth. The disconnection occurred about fifty minutes after the launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket’s first rocket stage has successfully landed on a drone ship.
At this launch, SpaceX has made no attempt to lift the fairing of the rocket, in fact the nose cone where the cargo is being transported. catch with a ship. The plan was instead to halt both halves with parachutes when they returned to earth and let them ‘land’ in the ocean, in order to be able to recover them. It is not yet clear how this has gone. SpaceX has previously allowed halves of the fairing to land intact in the ocean.
TESS is much lighter than the more than one tonne Kepler and weighs 350 kg. The big difference with Kepler is the much larger area that will map the new telescope. Kepler mainly focused on a relatively limited part of the space, with about 150,000 stars. In addition, TESS is about stars that are relatively close, at a maximum of three hundred light-years from Earth.
Astronomers hope that many new exoplanets will be discovered. This goes through the transit method, looking at a small dip in the brightness of stars that may indicate a planet passing by for the star. For this purpose, TESS is equipped with four wide-angle cameras, with which 85 percent of the space can be observed.
The new space telescope TESS is needed because the fuel of the Kepler telescope launched in 2009 is about to start. As a result, course corrections can no longer be made in the long run to keep Kepler in the required orbit around the earth. NASA expects that TESS will be operational in approximately sixty days.
At this launch, SpaceX has made no attempt to lift the fairing of the rocket, in fact the nose cone where the cargo is being transported. catch with a ship. The plan was instead to halt both halves with parachutes when they returned to earth and let them ‘land’ in the ocean, in order to be able to recover them. It is not yet clear how this has gone. SpaceX has previously allowed halves of the fairing to land intact in the ocean.
TESS is much lighter than the more than one tonne Kepler and weighs 350 kg. The big difference with Kepler is the much larger area that will map the new telescope. Kepler mainly focused on a relatively limited part of the space, with about 150,000 stars. In addition, TESS is about stars that are relatively close, at a maximum of three hundred light-years from Earth.
Astronomers hope that many new exoplanets will be discovered. This goes through the transit method, looking at a small dip in the brightness of stars that may indicate a planet passing by for the star. For this purpose, TESS is equipped with four wide-angle cameras, with which 85 percent of the space can be observed.
The new space telescope TESS is needed because the fuel of the Kepler telescope launched in 2009 is about to start. As a result, course corrections can no longer be made in the long run to keep Kepler in the required orbit around the earth. NASA expects that TESS will be operational in approximately sixty days.