Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Alien life is always interesting. Not much different, the US Space Agency or NASA has a desire to research related to life beyond Earth.
NASA has a Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which took off in 2018. TESS is a spacecraft to detect planets outside the solar system, also known as exoplanets.
TESS had a similar job with the Kepler spacecraft, which at that time had already identified 2,342 exoplanets. It said that 30 of them were confirmed to be in the habitable zone of their parent star and quite close to the water on the surface, quoted Engadget, Saturday (12/6/2021).
TESS does something different by finding out about worlds that are quite far from Earth. Because with Kepler too far to collect most of the details of the planets.
During its two-year mission, TESS studied more than 200,000 stars. TESS focuses on stars that are closer to us than those that are farther away.
The reasons could be easier to read and confirm. As well as allowing to collect more data regarding the specifications of the planets that have been detected.
During its main mission completed July 4, 2020, TESS imaged 75% of the starry sky. TESS also captured the giant mosaic, discovering 66 new exoplanets or worlds outside our solar system as well as nearly 2100 candidates that astronomers are working on to confirm.
“TESS produces high-quality bursts of observations that provide valuable data across a wide range of science topics. When it entered its expanded mission, TESS was already a huge success,” said TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Patricia Boyd, quoted from the NASA website.
Apart from TESS, NASA also hunts aliens through Perserverance. The robotic plane landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars last January.
Perserverance begins an exploration of the search for aliens, i.e. traces of ancient microbial life.
Jezero Crater itself is like a former lake basin that is thought to be fed by a river but has dried up. The location is sufficient to support the search for the remnants of life that ever existed from the Planet Mars.
Before reaching Mars, the robot made a long journey from Earth nearly seven months. Perseverance traveled 472 million km before finally penetrating the atmosphere of the Red Planet.
When entering the atmosphere, the craft has a speed of 19 thousand km per hour to descend to the surface of Mars. According to the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Michael Watkins, the new mission will begin when the plane has landed.
“We made the mission not to land, but actually to drive, and to get samples and do other technology demonstrations,” Watkins said.
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