![]() The most critical bit of mission planning was selecting an orbit for TESS that would provide a view free of obstacles - namely, Earth. TESS would also serve as a bridge from the (now-defunct) Kepler mission to Webb, as well as other large exoplanet imaging space missions with launch dates in the 2030s and beyond. Essentially, TESS would be a finder scope for Webb, scouting for Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting the brightest Sun-like and smaller M-dwarf stars within about 200 light-years of our solar system. “Best” in this case means exoplanets with measurable masses, as well as atmospheres that can be studied with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). TESS entered development in 2014 with the primary science goal of searching the entire sky for the best 1,000 small exoplanets within 200 light-years - i.e., the solar neighborhood. In addition, a science team comprising astronomers from more than a dozen universities worldwide collaborated to assemble the TESS observation program. That team, which ultimately devoted more than a million hours to the effort, included members from MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Ames Research Center, Orbital ATK (now part of Northrop Grumman), The Aerospace Corporation, Space Telescope Science Institute, and SpaceX. This mission is the result of more than a decade-long effort, with the primary goal of discovering transiting exoplanets in our solar neighborhood that are ripe for follow-up with the next generation of telescopes.ĭuring the next five years, we assembled a highly skilled and dedicated team to design, build, fly, and extract scientific data from TESS. But from its conception was born the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Unfortunately, NASA declined our proposal, noting that the considerably more capable Kepler Space Telescope - a much larger, $600 million mission dedicated to finding exoplanets by watching them transit their host stars - would soon launch. Rechristened the Hot Exoplanet Transit Experiment-Survey (HETE-S), it would carry out a nearly all-sky survey for transiting hot Jupiters at low cost (approximately $2 million per year) for five years. So, in 2005, we proposed to NASA that HETE-2 be assigned a new task and a new name. This level of precision would allow us to spot transits of close-in Jupiter-sized planets - so-called hot Jupiters - orbiting solar-type stars. We knew that our MIT-built star trackers were capable of detecting changes of as little as 0.1 percent in a star’s brightness. We pondered how we might repurpose the High Energy Transient Explorer-2 (HETE-2), which we had launched in 2000, to search for signals from extrasolar planets as they passed in front of their host stars. So, members of my small satellite research group at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research opened discussions with our neighbors at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Researchers still weren’t sure whether planets circling other stars were plentiful or rare. ![]() Ten years later, exoplanet research remained in its infancy. ![]() In 1995, astronomers discovered the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star. ![]()
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