Dr. George Ricker is the Principle Investigator of the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Mission, which will succeed Kepler as the primary US space observatory looking for exoplanets. He reviews the mission, which will launch in 2017, in this video:
From the caption:
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky. In its two-year prime survey mission, TESS will monitor more than 200,000 bright stars in the solar neighborhood for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. This first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, around a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances.
TESS stars will typically be 30-100 times brighter than those surveyed by the Kepler satellite; thus, TESS planets will be far easier to characterize with follow-up observations. For the first time it will be possible to study the masses, sizes, densities, orbits, and atmospheres of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.
An additional data product from the TESS mission will be full frame images (FFI) with a cadence of 30 minutes. These FFI will provide precise photometric information for every object within the 2300 square degree instantaneous field of view of the TESS cameras. These objects will include more than 1 million stars and bright galaxies observed during sessions of several weeks. In total, more than 30 million objects brighter than magnitude I=16 will be precisely photometered during the two-year prime mission. In principle, the lunar-resonant TESS orbit could provide opportunities for an extended mission lasting more than a decade, with data rates in excess of 100 Mbits/s.
An extended survey by TESS of regions surrounding the North and South Ecliptic Poles will provide prime exoplanet targets for characterization with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as well as other large ground-based and space-based telescopes of the future.
A NASA Guest Investigator program is planned for TESS. The TESS legacy will be a catalog of the nearest and brightest main-sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which should endure as the most favorable targets for detailed future investigations.
TESS is currently targeted for launch in late 2017 as a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission.
Project Blue intends to develop a small, low cost space telescope that looks continually at our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri, and try to directly image any planets orbiting it. A coronagraph will be used to block the otherwise blinding glare of the stars.
The project has opened a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1M to fund the initial design study for the system, which is expected eventually to cost around $30M.
… we need your help. This isn’t a traditional space mission. Within astrophysics, NASA has traditionally funded projects with a much broader scope, like Kepler and Hubble, rather than a project like ours that is focused on a single target. So we started this campaign with the belief that together, people all over the world could push the boundaries of discovery in space, and possibly achieve one of the greatest milestones of human exploration.
With the formation of Project Blue, we brought together the technical experts who can build and launch this telescope: scientists from organizations like BoldlyGo Institute, Mission Centaur, the SETI Institute, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. And now we’re asking for your support to get involved, and make Project Blue a reality.
Here is a video about the project:
From the website:
Project Blue is a new science initiative to capture the first photograph of a potential Earth-like planet orbiting another Sun-like star. The mission aims to launch a lightweight space telescope to directly image exoplanets around Earth’s nearest star system, Alpha Centauri A and B. With a budget the fraction of the cost of a mid-size astrophysics mission, and a planned launch by the end of the decade, this venture represents an ambitious leap forward in low-cost, high-impact space exploration. Through active collaboration between research institutions, universities, private industry and citizens, Project Blue seeks to make space exploration a participatory, collective endeavor and inspire millions worldwide to engage in scientific inquiry.
The plan is to build a telescope to stare at those two closely paired stars over the course of two years. Because they’re so close to us in astronomical terms — a mere 4.37 light-years, or 26 trillion miles — it would be possible to get a direct image of any potentially habitable planets using a telescope that has a 20-inch-wide (0.5-meter-wide) mirror, Morse said.
What’s more, the telescope would be able to analyze the light reflected by those planets. That could tell scientists what their atmospheres are made of. If the planet shines with the right shade of blue, that would suggest it’s an alien Earth.
Via a NASA-led citizen science project, eight people with no formal training in astrophysics helped discover what could be a fruitful new place to search for planets outside our solar system – a large disk of gas and dust encircling a star known as a circumstellar disk.
Artist’s concept of the newly discovered disk. Credits: Jonathan Holden
A paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and coauthored by eight citizen scientists involved in the discovery, describes a newly identified red dwarf star, AWI0005x3s, and its warm circumstellar disk, the kind associated with young planetary systems. Most of the exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, that have been imaged to date dwell in disks similar to the one around AWI0005x3s.
The disk and its star are located in what is dubbed the Carina association – a large, loose grouping of similar stars in the Carina Nebula approximately 212 light years from our sun. Its relative proximity to Earth will make it easier to conduct follow-on studies.
“Most disks of this kind fade away in less than 30 million years,” said Steven Silverberg, a graduate student at Oklahoma University and lead author of the paper. “This particular red dwarf is a candidate member of the Carina association, which would make it around 45 million years old. It’s the oldest red dwarf system with a disk we’ve seen in one of these associations.”
Since the launch of NASA’s Disk Detective website in January 2014, approximately 30,000 citizen scientists have performed roughly two million classifications of stellar objects, including those that led to this discovery. Through Disk Detective, citizen scientists study data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE), the agency’s Two-Micron All Sky Survey project, and other stellar surveys.
“Without the help of the citizen scientists examining these objects and finding the good ones, we might never have spotted this object,” said Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Fight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who leads Disk Detective. “The WISE mission alone found 747 million objects, of which we expect a few thousand to be circumstellar disks.”
The eight citizen scientist co-authors, members of an advanced user group, volunteered to help by researching disk candidates. Their data led to the discovery of this new disk.
“I’ve loved astronomy since childhood and wanted to be part of the space program, as did every boy my age,” adds Milton Bosch, a citizen scientist co-author from California. “I feel very fortunate to be part of such a great group of dedicated people, and am thrilled to partake in this adventure of discovery and be a co-author on this paper.”
Disk Detective is a collaboration between NASA, Zooniverse, the University of Oklahoma, University of Córdoba in Argentina, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Space Telescope Science Institute, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Carnegie Institution of Washington, University of Hawaii and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.
To learn more about opportunities for the public to participate in NASA science and technology projects, visit: www.nasa.gov/solve
is a new science initiative to capture the first photograph of a potential Earth-like planet orbiting another Sun-like star. The mission aims to launch a lightweight space telescope to directly image exoplanets around Earth’s nearest star system, Alpha Centauri A and B.
With a budget the fraction of the cost of a mid-size astrophysics mission, and a planned launch by the end of the decade, this venture represents an ambitious leap forward in low-cost, high-impact space exploration.
Through active collaboration between research institutions, universities, private industry and citizens, Project Blue seeks to make space exploration a participatory, collective endeavor and inspire millions worldwide to engage in scientific inquiry.
The key technology will be a coronagraph that blocks the otherwise blinding light of the star and allows the planet’s far weaker reflected light to be observed:
Project Blue will place a state-of-the-art exoplanet imaging telescope into orbit. The instrument will be equipped with advanced high contrast imaging technologies embedded in a coronagraph with a deformable mirror, multi-star wavefront control, and specialized post-processing techniques.
Together they can efficiently suppress the light from both stars (Alpha Centauri A and B) separately, thus allowing any planets to be seen. Our team has extensive experience developing and testing these technologies — now it’s time to get them into space!
Unusual proximity: At only 4.37 light years distance, Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to us, and contains not just one, but two stars similar to our Sun. The next Sun-like star is located 2.5x further away and would require a telescope 2.5 times larger in size.
Accessible Habitable Zone: Its proximity allows us to observe the habitable zone of each star for Earth-like planets with a modest space telescope with a powerful coronagraph, while any other star requires telescopes of at least 1 meter in size.
Fertile ground: Proxima Centauri, which is thought to be part of the same system, is now known to have a potentially habitable planet. We are acting on a new scientific urgency to investigate our nearest Sun-like stars!
The goal is to launch the privately funded observatory in 2019.
To sign up for email updates and/or to donate to the project, see Get Involved.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – Oct 11, 2016) – A consortium of prominent science and research institutions led by BoldlyGo Institute and Mission Centaur today announced Project Blue, an endeavor for a new era of discovery and space exploration. Employing recent technological advances, Project Blue is designed to be the first mission capable of obtaining an image of another planet like Earth — a powerful next step to understanding and exploring worlds outside our solar system. This new kind of privately-led, non-profit space initiative unites an extraordinary range of experts, including teams from the SETI Institute and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, on a daunting scientific and technical challenge.
Project Blue will work to fund, build and launch a compact exoplanet imaging telescope aimed at Alpha Centauri — the closest star system to Earth — to determine whether Earth-like planets exist around it and if so, to capture a direct “pale blue dot” image. While NASA’s Kepler mission has shown that terrestrial-sized planets are common in our galaxy, no one has yet been able to take a picture of one as small as Earth, in an orbit that could potentially sustain life. Project Blue would be the first. The mission will take about three years to construct and will conduct an intensive two-year study once in orbit.
“Now is the time to embark on this mission. Scientific imperative and technological advancements have converged to a point where we can finally take a serious look at our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri,” said Jon Morse, CEO of BoldlyGo Institute. “Does it contain rocky planets? Do they have oceans and atmospheres? Could they conceivably support life? We launched Project Blue because we believe such a discovery would profoundly impact humankind’s understanding of the universe and spur a new wave of excitement in science and astronomy.”
Seeing Blue
Recent developments, including the extraordinary success of the Kepler mission and advances in optics and imaging technologies, have laid the groundwork for Project Blue. Kepler has discovered over 2300 confirmed exoplanets through indirect observation techniques, many of which scientists believe could have Earth-like characteristics. Imaging one directly is an achievement that would open a new path to detecting and characterizing possible life-sustaining worlds around nearby stars.
An Earth-like planet is characterized as 0.5 to 1.5 times the size of Earth and orbiting within the host star’s “habitable zone,” where the temperature could allow liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface. Such a planet with oceans and an atmosphere similar to Earth, unless obscured by clouds, could appear blue to the human eye.
Project Blue’s customized telescope will be mounted on an optimized commercial spacecraft and specifically focus on Alpha Centauri, allowing it to maintain modest size and cost compared to larger astrophysics missions. The spacecraft will conduct its study of the Alpha Centauri system from a special north-south, low-Earth orbit that provides the stable conditions necessary for such precise measurements.
Despite Alpha Centauri’s proximity, there is currently no telescope with high enough contrast capability to observe orbiting planets directly; detecting an Earth-sized planet next to its host star has been compared to detecting a firefly next to a lighthouse from ten miles away. Additionally, Alpha Centauri’s binary structure makes it a particularly challenging target. Since the system’s two stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, appear so close together in the night sky, observation requires a special approach to suppress both light sources to see any orbiting planets.
“What makes the Alpha Centauri system so attractive is that each of the two stars is a lot like our own sun, which gives us two chances to find planets in either of their habitable zones,” said Supriya Chakrabarti, professor in the Department of Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and director of its Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology. “This also gives us an opportunity to design a mission that leverages technology we’ve been developing and space qualifying in our NASA-supported programs.”
The Blue Moment
Beyond pioneering a range of cutting-edge technologies, Project Blue represents a new kind of endeavor: a privately-funded partnership of research organizations, universities and industry aiming to play a leadership role in space science. With BoldlyGo Institute and Mission Centaur at the helm, a number of leading institutions will partner on the project, with the list expected to grow.
“We’re excited to be an original member of this distinguished consortium working on this seminal project,” said Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute. “The SETI Institute has accumulated world-class scientific and technical expertise from previous space missions that we can contribute to make Project Blue a success.”
The partnership will combine its expertise to design, construct and operate the mission. Launch services will be provided by one of several commercial vendors expected to be proven by the time of launch.
About BoldlyGo Institute: The BoldlyGo Institute is based in New York and was founded to address highly compelling scientific questions through new approaches to developing space science missions while engaging the global community in the quest. The organization is led by a highly qualified and reputable Board of Directors, comprised of space scientists, engineers and explorers. Board members have decades of combined space involvement, including more than a decade of recent, senior leadership experience across NASA, specializing in spaceflight and the development of space hardware.
About Mission Centaur: Mission Centaur is a nonprofit organization that fosters public and private collaboration through Project Blue, an initiative seeking to find and capture the first image of an Earth-like planet in our neighboring star system Alpha Centauri. Mission Centaur was founded by a group of philanthropists, scientists and engineers to pursue one of humanity’s most ambitious and transformational space exploration missions.
Dr. Anglada will discuss the new paper he is first author in reporting the presence of a 1.3 Earth mass exoplanet in a temperate orbit around Proxima Centauri. This finding was reported in Nature on Thursday 25 Aug 2016. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/… Dr. Anglada will particpate remotely, and Dr. Franck Marchis of the SETI Institute will host a local panel to discuss the implications of the finding. “Our little world will never seem the same again”.
