SpaceX has been selected by NASA to provide launch services for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with oversight by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Explorers program.
NASA awards launch services contract
SpaceX has been selected by NASA to provide launch services for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with oversight by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Explorers program.
The launch is scheduled for August of 2017 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. NASA will spend $87 million on the launch. Launch services include spacecraft processing, payload integration, tracking, data and telemetry.
TESS’s mission is to detect transiting exoplanets in orbit around nearby bright stars. The three-year mission will sample hundreds of thousands of stars to establish a sample of exoplanets, especially seeking Earth and super-Earth sized planets outside Earth’s solar system.
NASA said TESS will monitor more than 500,000 stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits.
TESS is the first-ever space borne all-sky transit survey and will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized planets to gas giants with a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances.
“During its first two years in orbit the TESS spacecraft will concentrate on several hundred thousand specifically selected stars looking for small dips in their light caused by orbiting planets passing between their host star and us,” said George Ricker of MIT, principal investigator for TESS.
SpaceX will use Cape Canaveral’s Falcon 9 launch service for TESS.
