Satellite is off to dance with the Moon and find new worlds

A FALCON 9 rocket has taken off from Florida on Spacex’s first high-priority mission for Nasa – to put a planet-hunting orbital telescope into space.

The Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess, lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Wednesday. A technical glitch in the guidance-control system had forced a two-day delay. Within minutes of the launch, the main-stage booster separated from the upper part of the rocket and flew back to Earth for a touchdown on an unmanned landing vessel floating in the Atlantic.

The payload, Nasa’s latest astrophysics satellite soared on into orbit, on a two-year, £236million quest to detect worlds beyond our solar system capable of harbouring life.

Tess is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered around 3,700 exoplanets over the past 20 years and is running short of fuel. Nasa expects to pinpoint thousands more worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-earth” sized.

Roughly the size of a refrigerator with solar-panel wings and four special cameras, Tess will take about 60 days to reach a highly elliptical orbit between Earth and the Moon to begin its observations. “The Moon and the satellite are in a sort of dance,” said Joel Villasenor, a scientist for Tess at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.