Explorers needed to search for new planets.
Just take it 27 days at a time
She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow’d to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
—Lord Byron
CONSIDERING the age of things, all things, it wasn’t that long ago that the night brought terror. And on this planet, man was the hunted. But once he mastered fire, man was able to guard against the night. And the stars, instead of cueing the terror, became a thing of fascination. And he was able to think. Soon he was a poet and a mathematician and a philosopher.
Cue the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Man hasn’t tired of staring at the stars. In fact, this planet-hunting has become heady stuff. And it’s just getting started. Remember
1994, when a president of the United States was from around these parts? And nobody’d heard of the Internet? And cell phones were as big as breadbaskets? At the time, dispatches remind us, scientists on this third rock from the sun weren’t sure about other planets outside our solar system. But starting in 1995, NASA and other space agencies around the world revolutionized technology—and now can find planets. And have. Thousands of them.
Want a career at NASA, kids? Study your math. For here’s how planet-finding is done these days: Take a telescope, point it at a star, and measure how the star brightens and dims as the days (Earth days) pass. If it dims enough, and on a regular basis, you’ve found a small eclipse, and maybe a planet. Or a couple. The planets passing between the star and our eyes cause the star to dim just a fraction of a bit, in what NASA calls a transit. And the instruments of Homo faber, man the toolmaker, pick that up. And we can jot down another world.
Might want to jot down how the star wobbles, too, so you can figure out how many planets are affecting the star’s gravity, and how big those planets should be. It’s going to take more than Algebra I to figure it out.
NASA has announced it’s undergoing final prep to launch TESS, also known as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, but we much prefer TESS. Sometime around mid-month, it’ll load this refrigerator-sized box on a rocket (thank you Elon Musk and free enterprise) and put it in orbit somewhere between the moon and New York City. The best that we can do is fall in love.
George Ricker of MIT, who is the lead investigator watching Miss TESS as she dances upward, says the super space camera will cover 85 percent of the sky, bit by bit: “We expect TESS will discover a number of planets whose atmospheric compositions, which hold potential clues to the presence of life, could be precisely measured by future observers.” That’s because, for all of NASA’s wonder and mathematicians, we aren’t quite there yet. Mankind can measure wobbles and brightness, but we don’t have the kinds of binoculars it’ll take to spy on the neighbors.
Yet.
TESS will replace NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which is running out of fuel and will be retired soon. It’s already discovered more than 2,500 planets from 300 to 3,000 light years away. TESS will focus on the closer ones, relatively speaking. The contraption will stare into space, in sectors, for 27 days at a time.
AND THEN the work begins. According to NASA, scientists will use spectroscopy—to put it (much too) simply, the study of light—to “determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planet’s capacity to harbor life.”
So not only will these wobbles and dips help scientists decide if that planet spinning around yonder star is an icy gas balloon or a rocky Earth-type creation, but also help them decide if there’s water and an atmosphere. Looking at how light passes through the atmospheres several million light years away might give scientists a clue about whether that planet’s atmosphere has oxygen, helium, hydrogen, water . . . . Completely. And. Totally. Amazing. “TESS is opening a door for a whole new kind of study,” said Stephen Rinehart, a TESS project scientist. “We’re going to be able study individual planets and start talking about the differences between planets. The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come. It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research.”
She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes . . . . TESS, we may have a crush on you.