Author: Amanda Griffin

TESS Televised Events Today and Monday

Artist concept of TESS in front of a lava planet orbiting its host star.
Artist concept of TESS in front of a lava planet orbiting its host star. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The planned liftoff of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, remains scheduled for 6:32 p.m. EDT Monday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Meteorologists with the U.S. Air Force 45th Space Wing continue to predict an 80 percent chance of favorable weather for liftoff.

Today, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is hosting several events to be broadcast live on NASA TV. View the TESS Briefings and Events page for the full list of event participants.

The schedule is:
11 a.m. – NASA Social Mission Overview
1:30 p.m. – Prelaunch news conference
3 p.m. – Science news conference

Join us here or at NASA TV from 6 to 8 p.m. on Monday for live coverage from the countdown. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 is scheduled for 6:32 p.m.

Solar Panels Opened on NASA’s TESS Satellite

Solar panels are deployed on NASA's TESS satellite in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center.Technicians dressed in clean room suits check the solar panels, which were deployed, on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Inside the PHSF, the satellite is being processed and prepared for its flight.

TESS is scheduled to launch April 16, 2018, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The satellite is the next step in NASA’s search for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Dr. George Ricker of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission. NASA’s Launch Services Program is responsible for launch management.

Photo credit: NASA/Leif Heimbold