NASA's new planet-hunting mission, poised to launch Monday, aims to advance the search for extraterrestrial life by scanning the skies for nearby, Earth-like planets. TESS will survey far more cosmic terrain than its predecessor, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which launched in 2009, taking in some 85 percent of the skies. "That is about 20 times what the Kepler mission was able to detect." - Kepler vs TESS -Kepler, the first planet-hunting mission of its kind, "was launched to answer one single question: How common is a planet like Earth around a star like the Sun?" "TESS is the first step," said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center.

Source: Bangkok Post April 16, 2018 20:15 UTC