The @NASA_TESS spacecraft is now safely in space after a beautiful launch. Wednesday’s blastoff was a milestone of sorts for Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, the private launch service owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. But TESS marks the first under a special certification SpaceX has obtained to carry one of NASA’s highest-priority science instruments. TESS is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,700 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years and is running out of fuel. NASA expects to pinpoint thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth” sized - no larger than twice as big as our home planet.

Source: Huffington Post April 19, 2018 06:11 UTC