【T. D. Lee Colloquium No. 16】NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
by
TDLI
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is NASA’s ongoing mission to discover planets outside the solar system, and more generally, to explore the bright and time-variable sky. TESS uses four small optical telescopes to monitor the brightness of millions of stars over wide fields of view. In the six years since the mission began, TESS has covered nearly the entire sky, leading to the confirmation of about 500 new planets and the identification of about 7,000 planet candidates that are being followed up by ground-based observers. The initial goal of the TESS Mission — to detect 50 planets smaller than Neptune and measure their masses — has been achieved, and now TESS is in an Extended Mission with broader goals. This presentation will review the history of TESS since its inception in 2006, and the most important and interesting results that have been achieved thus far. He will also describe the characteristics of TESS data and how you might use the data yourself.
Josh Winn is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University. His research group uses the transit, Doppler, and astrometric methods to study the geometry and dynamics of exoplanetary systems, and study the demographics of planet populations. He is an Architect of the TESS mission and the author of a book for the general public, The Little Book of Exoplanets, published in 2023 by Princeton University Press.
Recorded Video：http://10.119.4.11/f/f199a4e77d684182bfec/
