NASA recruited a new

NASA has chosen a mission to spend up to $ 200 million to conduct a survey of the whole sky in an effort to find Earth 2.0.

The central tool of the new mission will be the TESS space observatory , abbreviated from the Transit Planet Satellite Satellite, scheduled to orbit in 2017. Just like Kepler's glass telescope, TESS will assume The task of searching for planets travels through the surface of the central star, just like the ballet dance that Venus created when moving across the sun. Thanks to this breakthrough observation method, Kepler has found 2,740 planet candidates, as of January 2013.

TESS can cover the whole sky - (Photo: NASA)

Although Kepler's powerful optical capabilities provided a back-end view, allowing astronomers to observe multi-planetary systems, identify small worlds of Mercury, or larger many times Jupiter. However, it only encompassed 0.28% of the sky, or about 145,000 main sequence stars in the constellation Thien Nga and Thien Cam. Meanwhile, TESS takes on a heavier task than having to cover the whole sky, promising to provide a huge amount of information for scientists' long-term mission to understand the number of stars that resemble the sun is out there, and the area can allow life to flourish.

'TESS will take over the first full sky survey, covering 400 times the area of ​​any previous mission,' according to Space.com quoted Project Leader George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT). The expert said the new telescope would identify thousands of unknown planets in the vicinity of the solar system, with the ability to focus on planets similar in size to Earth. According to NASA's press release, TESS will use a telescope to observe the whole sky, to detect planets moving across the surface of a central star, of all sizes from Earth size. or giant like planetary planets.

In 2009, Kepler was launched into space, and recently NASA decided to extend its operating time until 2016. Experts still hope that Kepler can catch evidence. There is no denying the existence of a world at the size of Earth, within the zone that allows life around its central star. Thanks to Kepler, astronomers were surprised by the prediction that there must be 100 billion planets in the Milky Way. Kepler's burden of responsibility, TESS, when launched into the low orbit of the planet, will become the next "planet hunter" , and promises to bring a deeper understanding of the lateral worlds. outside the solar system.