INTERNATIONAL - A NASA satellite scheduled to launch on Monday is
part of the US space agency's search for exoplanets, including ones
that could support life.
Lift-off of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) from
Cape Canaveral in Florida is scheduled for 6:32 pm (2232 GMT).
Meteorologists predict an 80 per cent chance of favourable weather.
TESS plans to survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near our sun in
its search for exoplanets, planets that orbit a star like our solar
system. NASA says it will be able to detect them when they
periodically block part of the light from their host stars.
These dips in the observed brightness of a star over time create a
pattern to reveal the signal of an orbiting planet, NASA said.
TESS scientists expect the mission to catalogue thousands of
potential exoplanets. Of these, approximately 300 are expected to be
between the size of the Earth and double the size of the Earth.
The satellite will seek to find exoplanets that have the most
promising conditions for supporting life, NASA said. The data will be
transmitted to Earth, where follow-up observations will be conducted
to confirm the existence of true exoplanets and not false positives.
The data will be collected during a two-year period in which TESS
will survey the entire sky by breaking it into 26 equal sectors.
Powerful cameras on the satellite will "stare" at each sector for at
least 27 days, looking at the brightest stars.
The first public release of processed data is planned for early in
2019, NASA said.