The Starry Night: NASA Planet Hunter Snaps Stunning Celestial Photo

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is off to a great start.

A month after takeoff, the planet hunter successfully completed a lunar flyby, which helped shove the spacecraft toward its final working orbit.

Along the way, one of the four TESS cameras snapped a two-second test exposure, centered on the southern constellation Centaurus. The result: this stunning image of more than 200,000 sparkling stars (below).

The upper right corner reveals the edge of the Coalsack Nebula; the bright star Beta Centauri is visible at the lower left border.

Starry, starry night (via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

If you think that’s impressive, just wait for the science-quality “first light” photo—expected to cover 400 times more sky using all four wide-field cameras—set for release in June.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on April 18, TESS is the next step in NASA’s search for planets outside our solar system. Its initial two-year mission will observe nearly the entire sky, looking for transit—a phenomenon that occurs when a planet passes in front of its star, causing a dip in the star’s brightness.

The Kepler space observatory used the same method to detect more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light years away.

“We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, NASA Astrophysics Division director Paul Hertz said in March. “Now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars.”

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Some 30 to 100 times brighter than any of Kepler’s targets, these stars’ luster allows researchers to study the absorption and emission of light in an effort to determine a planet’s mass, density, and atmospheric composition.

What they’re really looking for, though, are signs of water or other molecules that might hint at a planet’s capacity to harbor life.

“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,” George Ricker, principal investigator at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said recently.

In preparation for TESS’s mission, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors—13 in the south and 13 in the north—for individual scrutiny.

Intended to “cast a wider net than ever before,” the spacecraft serves as a sort of precursor to the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, heading into orbit in 2020.

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