![]() ![]() TESS’s sensitive instruments found more than just exoplanets during its primary mission. “Making high-precision measurements of stellar brightness at these frequencies makes TESS an extraordinary new resource for studying flaring and pulsating stars and other transient phenomena, as well as for exploring the science of transiting exoplanets.” “These changes promise to make TESS’s extended mission even more fruitful,” said Padi Boyd, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. These regions are known as the continuous viewing zones (CVZs). The circular regions where segment overlap at the ecliptic poles have observing period of just over 100 days, enabling longer period planets to be discovered. ![]() With a 27.4 day observing period per segment, the satellite is most sensitive to exoplanets with a periods of less than 13 days (so that at least two transits are used for discovery). TESS has a unique, 13.7 day, highly elliptical cislunar orbit about Earth. And in this case more data means a more successful mission. So during the secondary mission, TESS will be delivering a lot more data. It’ll also be able to measure the brightness of thousands of stars every 20 seconds. The spacecraft will now image each sector of the sky in only 10 minutes, rather than the previous 30 minutes. NASA has made some improvements to the way that TESS gathers and manages its data. It’ll search the parts of the sky it missed last time, as well as take a second look at some planet candidates. TESS has now begun its secondary mission, where it’ll spend another year imaging the southern sky again. TESS has four cameras, but there’s much more to it than that.īut that barrage of data is just the beginning, according to NASA. They’re interesting and cool, but they represent just a tiny fraction of the stream of data that the spacecraft has sent back to Earth. These panorama’s are just a side benefit of TESS. Image Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse (USRA) It features the prominent Milky Way, the Orion Nebula at the top, and the Large Magellanic cloud in the center. It’s a more complete image than the panorama of the northern sky. This results in a prominent gap in coverage.” TESS’s southern sky panorama was released about a year ago. In a press release, NASA explains that “For about half of the northern sectors, the team decided to angle the cameras further north to minimize the impact of scattered light from Earth and the Moon. The northern panorama has some significant gaps in it, compared to the more complete southern panorama. It took almost one full year of images to build the panorama of the northern sky, the same as it did for the southern panorama that NASA released about a year ago. The Milky Way figures prominently in the image, as does the Andromeda Galaxy, the small, bright white oval in the middle left of the image. This mosaic of the northern sky incorporates 208 images taken by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) during its second year of science operations, completed in July 2020. ![]()
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