The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will give the search for habitable worlds a massive boost when it sets upon its journey to probe planets orbiting stars for signs of life, possibly increasing the catalogue of known exoplanets by 400 percent, Popular Mechanics reported.
The NASA survey telescope will take over from where the Kepler space telescope left off.
Having used the "transit method" technique, TESS's predecessor was able to discover over 2,500 exoplanets, plus hundreds of potential candidates still waiting to be confirmed.
However, after nearly a decade-long mission, Kepler will run out of fuel.
This is where TESS steps in.
The spacecraft will be able to survey most of the sky by dividing it into 26 different segments known as tiles, according to NASA.
Unlike Kepler, which searched for exoplanets thousands to tens of thousands of light-years away from Earth toward the constellation Cygnus, TESS will search for exoplanets hundreds of light-years or less in all directions surrounding the solar system.
George Ricker, principal investigator of the TESS mission and director of MIT's CCD imaging laboratory, told Popular Mechanics that TESS could very likely discover "10 to 20 thousand new planets."
The aircraft will serve as a finder scope, he noted, which would allow researchers to "find a large sample from which the follow-up observations can be carried out in decades, even centuries to come."
TESS will spend two years monitoring more than 200,000 stars during its mission to catalogue hundreds of transiting exoplanet candidates, NASA reported.
During its first year, the spacecraft will observe the celestial Southern Hemisphere before moving on to the Northern Hemisphere in its second year, Space.com said.
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