Credit: NASA / GSDCThe spacecraft, almost ready-to-go, will discover thousands of worlds beyond our solar system. At a Wednesday news conference in Washington D.C., NASA team members unwrapped TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the agency's newest otherworldly probe. Says Paul Hertz, the director of NASA's astrophysics division: "Every star in the sky probably has a family of planets around it." To detect a new world, TESS will look for an eclipse-like event called a "transit.” That’s when a planet passes between its star and the spacecraft. Credit: Orbital ATKThat includes NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, now with a tentative May 2020 launch—and ARIEL, a new planet-finding mission from the European Space Agency, slated for a 2028 liftoff.

Source: Forbes March 28, 2018 21:36 UTC