NASA this week announced it is bringing the hunt for life on other planets a littler "closer to home."
With its Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, the space agency has been searching for Earth-sized exoplanets thousands to tens of thousands of light-years away. But what if we're missing a potentially habitable exoplanet just under our noses?
Aiming to cover all its bases, NASA will launch a new satellite that will hunt for exoplanets just outside our solar system. Expected to launch in the 2017-2018 timeframe, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will identify exoplanets orbiting the brightest stars located "hundreds of light-years or less in all directions surrounding our solar system" using what's known as the "transit method."
The satellite searches for "dips in brightness" caused when a planet passes in front of (aka transits) its parent star, blocking some of the star's light, NASA explains. These dips in brightness can reveal the planet's presence, its size, and how long it takes to complete an orbit.
Those last two bits of information, NASA said, "are critical to understanding whether a planet is capable of supporting life."
NASA scientists expect TESS to observe "at least 200,000 stars" during its two-year spaceflight mission, "resulting in the discovery of thousands of new exoplanets" that scientists will observe for years to come.
"The cool thing about TESS is that one of these days I'll be able to go out in the country with my daughter and point to a star and say 'there's a planet around that one,'" TESS Project Scientist Stephen Rinehart said in a statement.