Searching for Habitable Worlds

On Sept. 5, NASA awarded a Silver Achievement Medal to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) team. George Ricker, TESS principal investigator and senior research scientist at the Kavli Institute, says that "the NASA Silver Achievement Medal recognizes the revolutionary impact that TESS is now having on the emerging field of exoplanets, as well as TESS’ revealing of exciting new insights in stellar and extragalactic astrophysics."

"TOI-270 is a true Disneyland for exoplanet science, and one of the prime systems TESS was set out to discover," MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research postdoctoral scholar Maximilian Günther said. "It is an exceptional laboratory for not one, but many reasons -- it really ticks all the boxes."

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, has discovered its first Earth-sized exoplanet. The planet, named HD 21749c, is the smallest world outside our solar system that TESS has identified yet. ... “For stars that are very close by and very bright, we expected to find up to a couple dozen Earth-sized planets,” says lead author and TESS member Diana Dragomir, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “And here we are — this would be our first one, and it’s a milestone for TESS. It sets the path for finding smaller planets around even smaller stars, and those planets may potentially be habitable.”

At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT on April 18, 2018. After launch, TESS will use its fuel to reach orbit around the Earth, with a gravity assist from the moon. That will enable it to have a long-term mission beyond its two-year mission.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched on April 18, 2018, will travel through space, identifying more than 20,000 extrasolar planets orbiting a diverse range of stars. These exoplanets will range from Earth-sized planets to much larger gas giants. TESS is expected to catalog a sample of around 500 Earth-sized and “super Earth” planets, or those with radii less than twice that of Earth, including a subset of rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.

Scientists used observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) telescope, as well as other ground-based observatories, to identify seven planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star. All seven planets are Earth-sized and terrestrial — and all could potentially harbor liquid water.