NASA is about to step up its planet-hunting game with the launch of TESS
On a cold, clear night in January, Massachusetts Institute of Technology astrophysicist George Ricker and his students stepped onto a rooftop on campus and aimed a camera at the highest point in the sky.
That camera, an engineering model of the four being launched with NASA's TESS mission, revealed a night so thick with stars that they obscured the normally distinct constellations.
"In two seconds you could see things that were a hundred thousand to a million times fainter than what you could see with your naked eye," said Ricker, the mission's principal investigator.
The test offered a small taste of what TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, will discover after it launches, which could occur as soon as Monday afternoon. The spacecraft will scan almost all of the
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