SpaceX successfully launched successor to Kepler space telescope

SpaceX launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite with a Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday night. This new NASA space telescope has successfully decoupled and is expected to discover many more exoplanets than the Kepler space telescope.

SpaceX has confirmed that TESS has successfully decoupled to achieve the desired elliptical orbit. The disconnect happened about 50 minutes after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket’s first stage has successfully landed on a drone ship.

At this launch, SpaceX made no attempt to accommodate the rocket’s fairing, in fact the nose cone that carries the cargo, with a ship. The plan was instead to parachute down both halves as they fall back to Earth and land them in the ocean for recovery. It is not yet clear how this happened. SpaceX has previously let halves of the fairing land completely intact in the ocean.

TESS is a lot lighter than the Kepler weighing more than one ton and weighs 350 kg. The big difference with Kepler is the much larger area that the new telescope will map. Kepler has mainly focused on a relatively limited part of space, with about 150,000 stars. In addition, TESS concerns stars that are relatively close, at a maximum of three hundred light-years from Earth.

Astronomers hope that many new exoplanets will be discovered as a result. This is done via the transit method, which looks for a small dip in the brightness of stars that could indicate a planet passing in front of the star. For this, TESS is equipped with four wide-angle cameras, with which 85 percent of the room can be observed.

The new TESS space telescope is needed as the Kepler telescope launched in 2009 is running out of fuel. As a result, it will eventually no longer be possible to make course corrections to keep Kepler in the required orbit around the earth. NASA expects TESS to be operational in about 60 days.