The lofting of hardware high into space often calls for a holding of breath, but for those who have ploughed time and money into the $200m (£140m) Tess space telescope there is an extra frisson. “Right now, everything is go for a launch on Monday,” said Stephen Rinehart, the Tess project scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. When Kepler launched in 2009, astronomers knew that alien worlds circled faraway stars, but had little idea of their number and sizes. The space telescope will spend two years observing 200,000 of the brightest stars in the sky. Mission scientists hope to spot 500 Earth-sized planets and perhaps 20,000 new worlds in total.

Source: The Guardian April 15, 2018 22:07 UTC