NASA selects MIT-led TESS project for 2017 mission

$200 million project will launch telescopes to perform full-sky search for transiting exoplanets. Following a three-year competition, NASA has selected the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) project at MIT for a planned launch in 2017. The space agency announced the mission - to be funded by a $200 million grant to the MIT-led team - this afternoon. TESS team partners include the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) and MIT Lincoln Laboratory; NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center; Orbital Sciences Corporation; NASA's Ames Research Center; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; The Aerospace Corporation; and the Space Telescope Science Institute. The project, led by principal investigator George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MKI, will use an array of wide-field cameras to perform an all-sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets, ranging from Earth-sized planets to gas giants, in orbit around the brightest stars in the sun's neighborhood. An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than the sun; a transiting exoplanet is one that periodically eclipses its host star. "TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission," Ricker says.