Author Topic: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates  (Read 115220 times)

Online gongora

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Updates Thread for TESS mission.

NSF Threads for TESS : Discussion / Updates
NSF Articles for TESS :
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/?s=TESS

Successful launch on April 18, 2018 at 1851 EDT/2251 UTC on Falcon 9 (using the final new Block 4 booster, B1045) from SLC-40 at KSC.  ASDS landing was successful.



December 16, 2014
NASA Awards Launch Services Contract for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

NASA has selected SpaceX to provide launch services for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. TESS will launch aboard a Falcon 9 v1.1 launch vehicle, with liftoff targeted for August 2017 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

The total cost for NASA to launch TESS is approximately $87 million, which includes the launch service, spacecraft processing, payload integration, tracking, data and telemetry, and other launch support requirements.

TESS’s science goal is to detect transiting exoplanets orbiting nearby bright stars. During a three-year funded science mission, TESS will sample hundreds of thousands of stars in order to detect a large sample of exoplanets, with an emphasis on discovering Earth- and super-Earth-sized planets in the solar neighborhood.

The Launch Services Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is responsible for management and oversight of the Falcon 9 v1.1 launch services for TESS. The TESS Mission is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with oversight by the Explorers Program at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.



Other SpaceX resources on NASASpaceflight:
   SpaceX News Articles (Recent)
   SpaceX News Articles from 2006 (Including numerous exclusive Elon interviews)
   SpaceX Dragon Articles
   SpaceX Missions Section (with Launch Manifest and info on past and future missions)

   L2 SpaceX Section
« Last Edit: 04/18/2018 11:52 pm by gongora »

Offline ChrisGebhardt

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #1 on: 02/20/2018 06:33 pm »
TESS's launch windows are somewhat abnormal given what we're used to, but they make sense given its orbital needs.

On each launch day, the daily window will only be a few seconds in duration based on Falcon 9 fuel loading requirements.

The overall launch period is, generally, as follows:
Approx 10 days of back-to-back opportunities.
Approx. 5 days of stand down ops.
Repeat as needed.

The 16 April launch opportunity window begins with daily launch periods in the evening local time at CCAFS.  The launch window advances by ~20mins each day based on Earth, Moon, launch-site alignment/phasing.

Once the F9 places TESS in its initial orbit, it will take ~60 days to progressively raise, change the inclination, and then lower the orbit (including a lunar flyby) before TESS reaches its science orbit and begins functioning.

It will spend 12 months surveying nearly the entire Southern Hemisphere's worth of stars first.  It will then reorient to spend the next 12 months doing the same for the Northern Hemisphere.

Primary mission is 2 year duration.  TESS is designed to function, with funding extensions, for over 20 years.
« Last Edit: 02/20/2018 06:41 pm by ChrisGebhardt »

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #2 on: 02/21/2018 06:23 pm »
Quote
The last solar array deployment test for @NASA_TESS has been completed! #TESS is ready for fueling and then launch! @NASAGoddard @OrbitalATK @MIT @MITLL @NASAAmes @TESSatMIT

https://twitter.com/nasa_tess/status/966381556066594816

Offline Chris Bergin

TESS - the latest exoplanet finder - in final preparations for launch -
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/03/tess-exoplanet-finder-final-preparations-launch/

- By Justin Davenport.

This covers the spacecraft overview! :)
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Offline Michael Baylor

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #4 on: 03/06/2018 06:42 pm »
Media accreditation is open. Launch date and time confirmed.

Quote
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is targeted to launch no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT April 16 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) in Florida. The mission will find planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, that periodically block part of the light from their host stars as they pass by, or transit.

Offline jacqmans

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #5 on: 03/07/2018 08:04 am »
March 06, 2018
MEDIA ADVISORY M18-041

Media Invited to Upcoming Launch of NASA’s Newest Planet-Hunting Spacecraft

Media accreditation now is open for the launch of a NASA spacecraft that will search for planets outside of our solar system with a field of view almost 400 times larger than that of the agency’s Kepler mission.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is targeted to launch no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT April 16 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) in Florida. The mission will find planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, that periodically block part of the light from their host stars as they pass by, or transit.

Media prelaunch and launch activities will take place at CCAFS and NASA’s neighboring Kennedy Space Center. Credentialing deadlines are as follows:

•International media without U.S. citizenship must apply by 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 15, for access to CCAFS, or by 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 29, for Kennedy media activities only.
•U.S. media must apply by 4:30 p.m. Friday, April 6.

All media accreditation requests should be submitted online at:

https://media.ksc.nasa.gov/

For questions about accreditation, please email [email protected]. For other questions, or additional information, contact Kennedy’s newsroom at 321-867-2468.

TESS will search for thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest and nearest stars outside our solar system during a two-year period of surveying our solar neighborhood. In its mission to identify new worlds, the spacecraft will monitor more than 200,000 stars, looking for a telltale sign: a decrease in a star’s brightness that occurs when an orbiting planet transits between its star and an observing spacecraft, temporarily blocking the star’s light.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. 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 participating in the mission.

NASA’s Launch Services Program is responsible for launch management of TESS.

For more information on TESS, go to:

https://www.nasa.gov/tess
Jacques :-)

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #6 on: 03/07/2018 01:01 pm »
Posted a couple of days ago:

Quote
Moving @NASA_TESS into the clean tent @NASAKennedy where it will wait to meet the @SpaceX Falcon 9!

https://twitter.com/NASA_TESS/status/970737478926782467

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #7 on: 03/19/2018 04:41 pm »
March 19, 2018
MEDIA ADVISORY M18-045

Join NASA at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, March 28, as astrophysics experts discuss the upcoming launch of NASA’s next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Reporters can attend the event in person at the James Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington or participate by phone.

The briefing will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

Scheduled to launch April 16, TESS is expected to find thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighborhood. Powerful telescopes like NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can then further study these exoplanets to search for important characteristics, like their atmospheric composition and whether they could support life.
Credits: NASA GSFC

The news briefing participants will be: 

    Paul Hertz, director, Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington
    George Ricker, TESS principal investigator, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts
    Sara Seager, TESS deputy director of science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
    Jeff Volosin, TESS project manager, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

A question-and-answer session will take place during the event with reporters on-site and by phone. Members of the public can also ask questions during the briefing by participating in person, or using #AskNASA.

To participate by phone, reporters must contact Felicia Chou at 202-358-0257 or [email protected], or Claire Saravia at 301-286-1940 or [email protected], no later than the morning of March 28.

For more information on TESS, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/tess
« Last Edit: 03/20/2018 07:04 am by jacqmans »
Best quote heard during an inspection, "I was unaware that I was the only one who was aware."

Offline jacqmans

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #8 on: 03/20/2018 07:03 am »
Jacques :-)

Offline jacqmans

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #9 on: 03/28/2018 06:51 pm »
March 28, 2018
RELEASE 18-016

NASA Prepares to Launch Next Mission to Search Sky for New Worlds

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is undergoing final preparations in Florida for its April 16 launch to find undiscovered worlds around nearby stars, providing targets where future studies will assess their capacity to harbor life.

“One of the biggest questions in exoplanet exploration is: If an astronomer finds a planet in a star’s habitable zone, will it be interesting from a biologist's point of view?” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge, which is leading the mission. “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.”

On March 15, the spacecraft passed a review that confirmed it was ready for launch. For final launch preparations, the spacecraft will be fueled and encapsulated within the payload fairing of its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

TESS will launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth. Sixty days after launch, and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission.

Four wide-field cameras will give TESS a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of our entire sky. Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that TESS will observe one by one. The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away

“We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters. “TESS will cast a wider net than ever before for enigmatic worlds whose properties can be probed by NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and other missions.”

TESS will concentrate on stars less than 300 light-years away and 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets. The brightness of these target stars will allow researchers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planets’ capacity to harbor life.

“TESS is opening a door for a whole new kind of study,” said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which manages the mission. “We’re going to be able study individual planets and start talking about the differences between planets. The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come. It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research.”

Through the TESS Guest Investigator Program, the worldwide scientific community will be able to participate in investigations outside of TESS’s core mission, enhancing and maximizing the science return from the mission in areas ranging from exoplanet characterization to stellar astrophysics and solar system science.

“I don’t think we know everything TESS is going to accomplish,” Rinehart said. “To me, the most exciting part of any mission is the unexpected result, the one that nobody saw coming.”

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. George Ricker, of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, serves as principal investigator for the mission. TESS’s four wide-field cameras were developed by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. 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.

For more information on TESS, go to:

https://www.nasa.gov/tess
Jacques :-)

Offline jacqmans

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #10 on: 03/28/2018 06:52 pm »
Jacques :-)

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #11 on: 03/28/2018 08:23 pm »
This is TESS, Our Newest Planet-Hunter

TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets. In this image, technicians help prepare the spacecraft for its mission.

Currently scheduled to launch on April 16, 2018, TESS will survey the entire sky over the course of two years by breaking it up into 26 different sectors, each 24 degrees by 96 degrees across. The powerful cameras on the spacecraft will stare at each sector for at least 27 days, looking at the brightest stars at a two-minute cadence. From Earth, the Moon occupies half a degree, which is less than 1/9,000th the size of the TESS tiles.The stars TESS will study are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed, which will enable far easier follow-up observations with both ground-based and space-based telescopes. TESS will also cover a sky area 400 times larger than that monitored by Kepler.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/tess_with_techs_4000.jpg

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/this-is-tess-our-newest-planet-hunter
« Last Edit: 03/28/2018 08:23 pm by Star One »

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #12 on: 03/30/2018 03:54 am »
March 19, 2018
MEDIA ADVISORY M18-045

Join NASA at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, March 28, as astrophysics experts discuss the upcoming launch of NASA’s next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Reporters can attend the event in person at the James Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington or participate by phone.

...

The news briefing participants will be: 

    Paul Hertz, director, Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington
    George Ricker, TESS principal investigator, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts
    Sara Seager, TESS deputy director of science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
    Jeff Volosin, TESS project manager, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=immnIymQoVw?t=001


NASA Discusses Upcoming Launch of Next Planet Hunter

NASA Video
Published on Mar 28, 2018

During a press conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., astrophysics experts discussed the upcoming launch of NASA’s next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
 
Scheduled to launch April 16, TESS is expected to find thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighborhood. Powerful telescopes like NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can then further study these exoplanets to search for important characteristics, like their atmospheric composition and whether they could support life.

« Last Edit: 03/30/2018 03:54 am by deruch »
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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #13 on: 04/05/2018 04:05 am »
The Unique Orbit of NASA’s Newest Planet Hunter


NASA Goddard
Published on Apr 4, 2018

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite - TESS - will fly in an orbit that completes two circuits around Earth every time the Moon orbits once. This special orbit will allow TESS’s cameras to monitor each patch of sky continuously for nearly a month at a time. To get into this orbit, TESS will make a series of loops culminating in a lunar gravity assist, which will give it the final push it needs. TESS will reach its orbit about 60 days after launch.





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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #14 on: 04/08/2018 07:53 pm »
Quote
Going inside NASA’s Clean Room for a rare look at a SpaceX payload
By TomCross
Posted on April 8, 2018

NASA invited media to a very special opportunity to go inside their Clean Room at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is where satellites are meticulously prepared in the weeks leading up to their scheduled launch date.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-payload-tess-nasa-clean-room/

Offline Chris Bergin

We expect the Static Fire to be NET Wednesday per Range documentation.
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Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #16 on: 04/10/2018 08:47 pm »
Quote
Launch hazard area for upcoming #SpaceX mission with NASA's TESS spacecraft. Indicates post-launch operations at sea, possibly drone ship recovery for #Falcon9 first stage. Targeting Monday liftoff from LC-40 at 1832 ET (2232 UTC).

https://twitter.com/emrekelly/status/983804678172442624?s=21

Offline Chris Bergin

F9 is confirmed as vertical on the pad ahead of the Static Fire test. Window opens at 11 am local.
« Last Edit: 04/11/2018 11:23 am by Chris Bergin »
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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #18 on: 04/11/2018 01:39 pm »
Quote
I can confrim @SpaceX #Falcon9 1st stage for @NASA_TESS raised at #pad40 this v hazy AM 4/11. awaiting ignition for static fire test. window opens 11am. @ken_kremer kenkremer.com spaceupclose.com

https://twitter.com/ken_kremer/status/984057211436617729

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Re: LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 : TESS : April 18, 2018 : Updates
« Reply #19 on: 04/11/2018 01:40 pm »
Quote
The @SpaceX #Falcon9 fairing for @NASA_TESS arrived over the weekend to meet #TESS for encapsulation @NASAKennedy. After launch, TESS will find new planets around other stars, called exoplanets, that scientists will study for decades to come.

https://twitter.com/nasa_tess/status/984057626706239488

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