The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an astrophysics Explorer-class mission between NASA and MIT. After launching in 2017, TESS will use four cameras to scan the entire sky, searching for planets outside our Solar System, known as exoplanets. The mission will monitor over 500,000 of the brightest stars in the sky, searching for dips in their brightness that would indicate a planet transiting across. TESS is predicted to find over 3,000 exoplanet candidates, ranging from gas giants to small rocky planets. About 500 of these planets are expected to be similar to Earth's size. The stars TESS monitors will be 30-100 times brighter than those observed by Kepler, making follow-up observations much easier. Using TESS data, missions like the James Webb Space Telescope can determine specific characteristics of these planets, including whether they could support life.
In 1997 when the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, was launched, its mission was scheduled to last just a few years. Now, 17 years later, the TRMM mission has come to an end. NASA and t...
In this talk, Dr. Paul Newman tells the story of how scientists and policy-makers safeguarded the Earth’s ozone layer and the world we avoided by by regulating chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) . Back in ...
Having just arrived in Greenland, the first challenge for the Operation IceBridge Arctic 2015 campaign was to survey a broad swath of Arctic sea ice … and along the way, locate and precisely overfl...
NASA’s Operation IceBridge is back in the field, but this time, there’s a twist. Instead of using the P-3 or DC-8 aircraft from previous campaigns, they’ve outfitted a C-130 cargo plane for the tri...