NASA’s TESS Planet Hunter Captures 200,000 Stars In Its First-Ever Image

Nearly a month after lift-off, NASA’s revolutionary Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has come into action and beamed the first-ever image it took in space.

The photograph, shared by the space agency on May 18, shows more than 200,000 stars shining in the southern constellation Centaurus including one of the brightest stars in the night sky, Beta Centauri, in the lower left. The image was taken as part of a two-second test exposure using one of the satellite’s four main cameras.

Though the photograph is not useful in terms of scientific study or finding exoplanets, it does mark an important step in the satellite’s mission, which is set to begin a month later. More importantly, it gives us an idea of the true scale of our exoplanet hunter’s capabilities.

As NASA said in a release, this is just the work of one of the four cameras TESS will deploy in its search for exoplanets. Once all four are deployed, the satellite will be able to cover 400 times the area shown in this particular shot. It will scan large swaths of distant stars for transits or occasional dimming episodes occurring due to the presence of an exoplanet orbiting around.

The satellite will observe different regions of the cosmos over the course of two years. NASA hopes it will find thousands of exoplanets which will give scientists a bunch of promising options to focus on. Once the exoplanet candidates are identified, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2020, will take a close look and analyze their atmospheric composition to know more about the conditions prevailing on those worlds and see if life could exist somewhere beyond Earth.

TESS captured the recent photograph after a quick lunar flyby on May 17. The satellite flew about 5,000 miles from the moon, a move that provided gravity assist and pushed the satellite towards its highly elliptical working orbit. The orbital path will maximize the area TESS could scan, but in order to reach there, it will need one final thruster burn on May 30. Once there, it’ll perform a few more camera calibrations and begin the work. NASA said the first light image or "science-quality" image from the satellite is expected to sometime in June.