US space agency's new planet-hunting mission, poised to launch Monday, aims to advance the search for extraterrestrial life by scanning the skies for nearby, Earth-like planets. EXOPLANETSTess is expected to reveal 20,000 planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, Nasa said. Nasa predicts that Tess could find more than 50 Earth-sized planets and up to 500 planets less than twice the size of the Earth. "That is about 20 times what the Kepler mission was able to detect." "One of the many amazing things that Kepler told us is that planets are everywhere and there are all kinds of planets out there.

Source: Daily Nation April 16, 2018 15:00 UTC