Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

Tag: Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

NASA Needs Your Help in the Search for Alien Life

October 11, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Becky Ferreira October 2, 2020 (vice.com)

• Since the 1990s, scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets throughout our galaxy contain a dizzying variety of extraterrestrial environments, some of which may host life.

• On September 29th, NASA launched the citizen science project ‘Planet Patrol’ on Zooniverse, inviting volunteers to join the hunt for new exoplanets by examining images snapped by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which has been in orbit around Earth since 2018.
• Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the SETI Institute in California, said the project has already attracted more than 1,600 participants who have collectively delivered 100,000 individual classifications in just three days.

• “Citizen science projects are a great way to engage our built-in, never-ending curiosity about the world we live in,” says Kostov. Planet Patrol can also “promote a sense of a community pursuing the common goal of understanding the universe and our place in it.”

• The TESS satellite is designed to spot exoplanets as they pass in front of the stars they orbit, causing the star’s brightness to fade slightly. If these light dips occur at regular intervals, it’s a good sign that a planet may be present. Once the existence of an exoplanet has been confirmed, scientists can conduct follow-up observations that reveal basic properties of the distant world, including whether it might be habitable. For this reason, exoplanet-hunting is an important component of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

• Scientists use automated software and machine learning to sift through the hundreds of thousands of pictures TESS takes each year. These systems can flag likely exoplanets to a certain extent, but they have trouble recognizing “imposter” false transit events. For instance, binary systems that contain two stars can produce a light dip, or instrument and/or astrophysical noise that distort the TESS images, which automated processing software might accidentally catalog as an exoplanet candidate. “The human eye is very good at quickly and reliably spotting such image distortions,” says Kostov.

• Planet Patrol participants are tasked with evaluating the quality of TESS images used to distinguish between potential false positives and bona-fide planet candidates. It’s the latest of several exoplanet-hunting platforms that have benefitted from the time and dedication of amateur space enthusiasts, such as Planet Hunters and Exoplanet Explorers. Says Kostov, “My hope is that the project sparks a continuous interest in exoplanets in particular and in astrophysics in general.”

Since the 1990s, scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets, which are worlds that orbit stars other than the Sun, revealing that our galaxy

contains a dizzying variety of extraterrestrial environments, some of which may host life.

Now, NASA is inviting volunteers to join the hunt for new exoplanets by examining images snapped by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which has been in orbit around Earth since 2018.

On Monday, NASA launched the citizen science project Planet Patrol on Zooniverse, enabling anyone with an internet connection to spot and classify likely exoplanets in TESS’ starry images.

Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the SETI Institute in California, said the project already has more than 1,600 participants who have collectively delivered 100,000 individual classifications in just three days.

“Citizen science projects are a great way to engage our built-in, never-ending curiosity about the world we live in—be it our own planet or a planet a hundred light years away,” said Kostov in an email.

Planet Patrol can also “promote a sense of a community pursuing the common goal of understanding the universe and our place in it,” Kostov added, which is especially welcome at a time when many people are stuck at home due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

TESS is designed to spot exoplanets as they pass in front of the stars they orbit, which is known as a transit. Transits cause the star’s brightness to fade slightly, and if these light dips occur at regular intervals, it’s a good sign that a planet may be present.

1:02 minute NASA “Planet Patrol” video (‘NASA Goddard’ YouTube)

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NASA Teams Up With Major Alien Hunting Group As They Up the Search For Extraterrestrials

November 6, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “e156 NASA Teams Up With Major Alien Hunting Group As They Up the Search For Extraterrestrials” on Spreaker.

Article by Sean Martin October 23, 2019 (express.co.uk)

• On October 23rd at the 70th annual International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC, the SETI initiative known as ‘Breakthrough Listen’ announced that it is partnering with NASA to use its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to search for exoplanets in the galaxy. Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives Dr Pete Worden said, “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.” “We’re looking forward to working together as we try to answer one of the most profound questions about our place in the Universe: Are we alone?”

• Using an array of wide-field cameras to survey 85 percent of the sky, the TESS space satellite identifies telltale brightness dips that indicate planets crossing in front of its star to allow it to study the mass, size, density and orbit of small planets, including rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars. Using this data, TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets that the Breakthrough Listen team should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Says TESS Deputy Science Director Sara Seager, “Out of all the exoplanet endeavours only SETI holds the promise for identifying signs of intelligent life.”

• The technique for finding exoplanets by identifying dips in luminosity of a star allowed the Kepler space telescope to discover Boyajian’s Star in 2015 by the online astronomers known as ‘Planet Hunters’. Astronomers speculated that this dip in luminosity might be due to an artificial ‘megastructure’ or ‘Dyson Sphere’ partially constructed around the star to harbor its energy. But Dr Andrew Siemion, leader of the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, now says that “dust particles in orbit around the star are responsible for the dimming”.

• [Editor’s Note] The top tier leadership of both SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and NASA know that we have a secret space program that interacts with a variety of extraterrestrial beings and civilizations within our own solar system and throughout the galaxy. This ‘partnership’ between them is just a show to make people believe that astronomers and scientists are hard at work searching for alien civilizations on distant exoplanets, but despite their best efforts they have not found any. The reason is because both SETI and NASA exist to do the bidding of the uber-elite and their attack dog, the Deep State, who want to maintain its 70-year history of covering up the extraterrestrial presence and hiding the truth from the rest of the people on this planet.

Breakthrough Listen, an organisation which scans the stars in the hope of finding alien signals, has announced it will be

teaming up with NASA in the hunt for aliens. Making the announcement at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC, Breakthrough Listen bosses said they will collaborate with scientists on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – which looks for planets outside the solar system. Together, the teams hope to answer the age-old question: Are we alone?

By analysing data from TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

The space telescope uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85 percent of the sky.

TESS is capable of studying the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars.

The satellite works by searching for telltale brightness dips potentially indicating planetary “transits” — the passages of orbiting worlds across their parent stars’ faces.

Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said: “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.

“We’re looking forward to working together as we try to answer one of the most profound questions about our place in the Universe: Are we alone?”

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