TESS Telescope

A few weeks ago NASA approved the work on the space telescope Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, wich will be sent to orbit on 2017 with the mission of finding exoplanets. Exoplanets are planets that orbit a star that is not our sun, and until now scientists have discovered over 800 of them, mainly thanks to the Kepler telescope wich began working in 2009. TESS goal is to identify planets within the habitable zones of nearby stars. This mainly means planets with a solid crust and with temperatures that allow the existence of liquid water. These are planets that could held life, or that could be our next home in the future.
TESS will count with 4 extended angle telescopes, and in order to indentify exoplanets it will use the transit method. The idea is that when a planet crosses in front of its star, the visual brightness of the star drops a small amount. According to these data, it is possible to determine the size of the planet. Theres another method that TESS doesn’t use but other exploring satellites do, wich is the radial velocity method. This method allows to determine the mass of exoplanets, so, with the information that both methods provide we can know the density of exoplanets and therefore infer information about their structure and composition.
Within its first 2 years of functioning, TESS is predicted to discover between a thousand and 10 thousand exoplanets that are Earth-size or larger, and it will definitively be a huge contribution in the exploration of our nearby solar systems.