The NASA research centre has tied up with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and MIT for the development of first in its kind a planet-searching satellite. A press release from MIT says that the planet-searching satellite would have the potential to discover hundreds of "super-Earth" planets, ranging from one to two times Earth's diameter, orbiting other stars.

 

Once the satellite would be launched, the cameras would cover the whole sky in two years, getting precise brightness measurements of about two million stars in total. NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope will receive those photographs and will analyze them further. The proposed satellite, called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), would use a set of six wide-angle cameras with large, high-resolution electronic detectors (CCDs), discloses the release.

 

Official release says that new observatory should be able to find more than a thousand planetary systems in two years out of two million. Reason given is that the orientation of orbits is random; about one star out of a thousand will have a planet whose orbit is oriented so that the planet regularly crosses in front of the star, resulting in a planetary transit. It would help to identify planets which have oxygen and any probability of life in other planets.