In the case of NGTS-20b, the host star has a mass of 1.47 solar masses, a radius of 1.78 solar radii, and a spectral type of G1. An exoplanet with a mass of 2.98 Jupiter masses and a radius of 1.07 Jupiter radii revolves around it with a period of 54.19 hours.
Oct 12, 2022TESS Status UpdateNASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) entered into safe mode on Monday, Oct. 10. The spacecraft is in a stable configuration that suspends science observations. Preliminary investigation revealed that the TESS flight computer experienced a reset.The TESS operations team reported that science data not yet sent to the ground appears to be safely stored on the satellite. Recovery procedures and investigations are underway to resume normal operations, which could take several days.TESS launched in April 2018 and has since discovered more than 250 exoplanets – worlds beyond our solar system – and thousands of additional candidates. The agency will provide additional updates at www.nasa.gov/tess.Media contact: Alise Fisher, NASA Headquarters / Claire Andreoli, NASA GoddardLast Updated: Oct 12, 2022Editor: Francis Reddy
Oct 14, 2022TESS Status UpdateTESS Resumes Normal OperationsNASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey (TESS) began its return to normal operations on Thursday, Oct. 13, at around 6:30 p.m. EDT. Engineers successfully powered up the instrument, and the spacecraft resumed its regular fine-pointing mode. The team expects that TESS will resume science observations later today, and all science data stored on the spacecraft will be downlinked at the next opportunity.TESS entered into safe mode on Oct. 10 following a reset of its flight computer. The team will spend the next several days analyzing data to determine the cause. Launched in 2018, TESS has been scanning almost the entire sky looking for planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets. TESS has also uncovered other cosmic phenomena, including star-shredding black holes and stellar oscillations. Read more about TESS discoveries at www.nasa.gov/tess.Media contact: Alise Fisher, NASA Headquarters / Claire Andreoli, NASA Goddard
On October 13, NASA's TESS spacecraft successfully returned to operations after entering safe mode due to a flight computer reset.Meanwhile, researchers used TESS & Spitzer data to determine the presence of an atmosphere around a super-Earth exoplanet ⬇️
Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star – the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet’s surface. The world is 95% Earth’s size and likely rocky.Astronomers previously discovered three planets in this system, called TOI 700 b, c, and d. Planet d also orbits in the habitable zone. But scientists needed an additional year of TESS observations to discover TOI 700 e.“This is one of only a few systems with multiple, small, habitable-zone planets that we know of,” said Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who led the work. “That makes the TOI 700 system an exciting prospect for additional follow up. Planet e is about 10% smaller than planet d, so the system also shows how additional TESS observations help us find smaller and smaller worlds.”Gilbert presented the result on behalf of her team at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. A paper about the newly discovered planet was accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.TOI 700 is a small, cool M dwarf star located around 100 light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado. In 2020, Gilbert and others announced the discovery of the Earth-size, habitable-zone planet d, which is on a 37-day orbit, along with two other worlds.The innermost planet, TOI 700 b, is about 90% Earth’s size and orbits the star every 10 days. TOI 700 c is over 2.5 times bigger than Earth and completes an orbit every 16 days. The planets are probably tidally locked, which means they spin only once per orbit such that one side always faces the star, just as one side of the Moon is always turned toward Earth.TESS monitors large swaths of the sky, called sectors, for approximately 27 days at a time. These long stares allow the satellite to track changes in stellar brightness caused by a planet crossing in front of its star from our perspective, an event called a transit. The mission used this strategy to observe the southern sky starting in 2018, before turning to the northern sky. In 2020, it returned to the southern sky for additional observations. The extra year of data allowed the team to refine the original planet sizes, which are about 10% smaller than initial calculations.“If the star was a little closer or the planet a little bigger, we might have been able to spot TOI 700 e in the first year of TESS data,” said Ben Hord, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park and a graduate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But the signal was so faint that we needed the additional year of transit observations to identify it.”TOI 700 e, which may also be tidally locked, takes 28 days to orbit its star, placing planet e between planets c and d in the so-called optimistic habitable zone.
