10 Frequently Asked Questions About The James Webb Space Telescope

what has nasa and jpl learned from opportunity that has helped with developing this new project?

Using the Power of Space to Fight Cancer

From cancer research to DNA sequencing, the International Space Space is proving to be an ideal platform for medical research. But new techniques in fighting cancer are not confined to research on the space station. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping to "read" large datasets. And for the past 15 years, these big data techniques pioneered by our Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been revolutionizing biomedical research.

Microgravity Research on Space Station

On Earth, scientists have devised several laboratory methods to mimic normal cellular behavior, but none of them work exactly the way the body does. Beginning more than 40 years ago aboard Skylab and continuing today aboard the space station, we and our partners have conducted research in the microgravity of space.  In this environment, in vitro cells arrange themselves into three-dimensional groupings, or aggregates. These aggregates more closely resemble what actually occurs in the human body. Cells in microgravity also tend to clump together more easily, and they experience reduced fluid shear stress -- a type of turbulence that can affect their behavior. The development of 3D structure and enhanced cell differentiation seen in microgravity may help scientists study cell behavior and cancer development in models that behave more like tissues in the human body.

In addition, using the distinctive microgravity environment aboard the station, researchers are making further advancements in cancer therapy. The process of microencapsulation was investigated aboard the space station in an effort to improve the Earth-based technology. Microencapsulation is a technique that creates tiny, liquid-filled, biodegradable micro-balloons that can serve as delivery systems for various compounds, including specific combinations of concentrated anti-tumor drugs. For decades, scientists and clinicians have looked for the best ways to deliver these micro-balloons, or microcapsules, directly to specific treatment sites within a cancer patient, a process that has the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment.

A team of scientists at Johnson Space Center used the station as a tool to advance an Earth-based microencapsulation system, known as the Microencapsulation Electrostatic Processing System-II (MEPS-II), as a way to make more effective microcapsules. The team leveraged fluid behavior in microgravity to develop a new technique for making these microcapsules that would be more effective on Earth. In space, microgravity brought together two liquids incapable of mixing on Earth (80 percent water and 20 percent oil) in such a way that spontaneously caused liquid-filled microcapsules to form as spherical, tiny, liquid-filled bubbles surrounded by a thin, semipermeable, outer membrane. After studying these microcapsules on Earth, the team was able to develop a system to make more of the space-like microcapsules on Earth and are now performing activities leading to FDA approval for use in cancer treatment.  

In addition, the ISS National Laboratory managed by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) has also sponsored cancer-related investigations.  An example of that is an investigation conducted by the commercial company Eli Lilly that seeks to crystallize a human membrane protein involved in several types of cancer together with a compound that could serve as a drug to treat those cancers. 

"So many things change in 3-D, it's mind-blowing -- when you look at the function of the cell, how they present their proteins, how they activate genes, how they interact with other cells," said Jeanne Becker, Ph.D., a cell biologist at Nano3D Biosciences in Houston and principal investigator for a study called Cellular Biotechnology Operations Support Systems: Evaluation of Ovarian Tumor Cell Growth and Gene Expression, also known as the CBOSS-1-Ovarian study. "The variable that you are most looking at here is gravity, and you can't really take away gravity on Earth. You have to go where gravity is reduced." 

Crunching Big Data Using Space Knowledge

Our Jet Propulsion Laboratory often deals with measurements from a variety of sensors -- say, cameras and mass spectrometers that are on our spacecraft. Both can be used to study a star, planet or similar target object. But it takes special software to recognize that readings from very different instruments relate to one another.

There’s a similar problem in cancer research, where readings from different biomedical tests or instruments require correlation with one another. For that to happen, data have to be standardized, and algorithms must be “taught” to know what they’re looking for.

Because space exploration and cancer research share a similar challenge in that they both must analyze large datasets to find meaning, JPL and the National Cancer Institute renewed their research partnership to continue developing methods in data science that originated in space exploration and are now supporting new cancer discoveries.

JPL’s methods are leading to the development of a single, searchable network of cancer data that researcher can work into techniques for the early diagnosis of cancer or cancer risk. In the time they’ve worked together, the two organizations’ efforts have led to the discovery of six new Food and Drug Administration-approved cancer biomarkers. These agency-approved biomarkers have been used in more than 1 million patient diagnostic tests worldwide.

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Do you believe in magic? ✨ ⁣ While appearing as a delicate and light veil draped across the sky, this @NASAHubble image reminds us of the power of imagination. What does this look like to you?⁣ ⁣ In reality, it's a small section of a Cygnus supernova blast wave, located around 2,400 light-years away. The original supernova explosion blasted apart a dying star about 20 times more massive than our Sun between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. Since then, the remnant has expanded 60 light-years from its center. ⁣ ⁣ Credit: @ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Blair; acknowledgment: Leo Shatz⁣ ⁣

Can You Guess Which Football Signals Robonaut Is Doing?

Meet Robonaut, our humanoid robot (which means it’s built to look like a person). This makes it easier for Robonaut to do the same jobs as a person. 

Robonaut could help with anything from working on the International Space Station to exploring other worlds…and now he might even take up a job as a referee!

We had Robonaut act out a few football signals. Can you guess what they are?!

Signal #1

Signal #2

Signal #3

Signal #4

Signal #5

Signal #6

Signal #7

Signal #8

Signal #9

Get the answers:

But it’s not all fun and games for Robonaut...from performing movements like a referee to helping astronauts on the space station, it’s important to have a robot that can perform the same tasks as humans. Why?  

Robonaut could someday be tested outside the space station. This testing would determine how well Robonaut could work with, or instead of, spacewalking astronauts. Designers even have ideas for sending a robot like Robonaut to another world someday. If testing goes well, who knows where Robonaut - or a better robot based on Robonaut - could end up?

To learn more about connections between space and football, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/football   

To learn more about Robonaut, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/robonaut2 

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What’s Up - March 2018

What’s Up For March?

Several Planets and the Zodiacal Light!

This month, at sunset, catch elusive Mercury, bright Venus, the Zodiacal Light, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter between midnight and dawn!

Both Venus and Mercury play the part of "evening stars" this month. At the beginning of the month they appear low on the western horizon.

The Moon itself joins the pair from March 18th through the 20th. 

The Moon skims by the Pleiades star cluster and Taurus's bright red star Aldebaran on the next few evenings, March 21 through the 23rd.

Jupiter, king of the planets, rises just before midnight this month and earlier by month end. 

Even through the smallest telescope or average binoculars, you should see the 4 Galilean moons, Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede.

The March morning sky offers dazzling views of Mars and Saturn all month long.

Through a telescope, you can almost make out some of the surface features on Mars.

Look a little farther into Mars' future and circle May 5th with a red marker. When our InSight spacecraft launches for its 6 month journey to the Red Planet, Mars will be easily visible to your unaided eye. 

Keep watching Mars as it travels closer to Earth. It will be closest in late July, when the red planet will appear larger in apparent diameter than it has since 2003!

You are in for a real treat if you can get away to a dark sky location on a moonless night this month -- the Zodiacal Light and the Milky Way intersect! 

The Zodiacal light is a faint triangular glow seen from a dark sky just after sunset in the spring or just before sunrise in the fall.

The more familiar Milky Way is one of the spiral arms of our galaxy. 

What we're seeing is sunlight reflecting off dust grains that circle the Sun in the inner solar system. These dust grains journey across our sky in the ecliptic, the same plane as the Moon and the planets.

Watch the full What’s Up for March Video: 

There are so many sights to see in the sky. To stay informed, subscribe to our What’s Up video series on Facebook. Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.   

Astronomers used three of NASA's Great Observatories to capture this multiwavelength image showing galaxy cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508. It includes X-rays recorded by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, visible light observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in green, and infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red. This rare galaxy cluster has important implications for understanding how these megastructures formed and evolved early in the universe.

How Astronomers Time Travel

Let’s add another item to your travel bucket list: the early universe! You don’t need the type of time machine you see in sci-fi movies, and you don’t have to worry about getting trapped in the past. You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your home! All you need is a powerful space-based telescope.

But let’s start small and work our way up to the farthest reaches of space. We’ll explain how it all works along the way.

This animation illustrates how fast light travels between Earth and the Moon. The farther light has to travel, the more noticeable its speed limit becomes.

The speed of light is superfast, but it isn’t infinite. It travels at about 186,000 miles (300 million meters) per second. That means that it takes time for the light from any object to reach our eyes. The farther it is, the more time it takes.

You can see nearby things basically in real time because the light travel time isn’t long enough to make a difference. Even if an object is 100 miles (161 kilometers) away, it takes just 0.0005 seconds for light to travel that far. But on astronomical scales, the effects become noticeable.

This infographic shows how long it takes light to travel to different planets in our solar system.

Within our solar system, light’s speed limit means it can take a while to communicate back and forth between spacecraft and ground stations on Earth. We see the Moon, Sun, and planets as they were slightly in the past, but it's not usually far enough back to be scientifically interesting.

As we peer farther out into our galaxy, we use light-years to talk about distances. Smaller units like miles or kilometers would be too overwhelming and we’d lose a sense of their meaning. One light-year – the distance light travels in a year – is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). And that’s just a tiny baby step into the cosmos.

The Sun’s closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. That means we see it as it was about four years ago. Betelgeuse, a more distant (and more volatile) stellar neighbor, is around 700 light-years away. Because of light’s lag time, astronomers don’t know for sure whether this supergiant star is still there! It may have already blasted itself apart in a supernova explosion – but it probably has another 10,000 years or more to go.

What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.

The Carina Nebula clocks in at 7,500 light-years away, which means the light we receive from it today began its journey about 3,000 years before the pyramids of Giza in Egypt were built! Many new stars there have undoubtedly been born by now, but their light may not reach Earth for thousands of years.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy, with rough locations for the Sun and Carina nebula marked.

If we zoom way out, you can see that 7,500 light-years away is still pretty much within our neighborhood. Let’s look further back in time…

This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643. Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with Hubble’s high resolution and clarity, were needed to produce an image of such exquisite detail and beauty.

Peering outside our Milky Way galaxy transports us much further into the past. The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is about 2.5 million light-years away. And that’s still pretty close, as far as the universe goes. The image above shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is about 60 million light-years away! That means we see it as it was about 60 million years ago.

As telescopes look deeper into the universe, they capture snapshots in time from different cosmic eras. Astronomers can stitch those snapshots together to unravel things like galaxy evolution. The closest ones are more mature; we see them nearly as they truly are in the present day because their light doesn’t have to travel as far to reach us. We can’t rewind those galaxies (or our own), but we can get clues about how they likely developed. Looking at galaxies that are farther and farther away means seeing these star cities in ever earlier stages of development.

The farthest galaxies we can see are both old and young. They’re billions of years old now, and the light we receive from them is ancient since it took so long to traverse the cosmos. But since their light was emitted when the galaxies were young, it gives us a view of their infancy.

This animation is an artist’s concept of the big bang, with representations of the early universe and its expansion.

Comparing how fast objects at different distances are moving away opened up the biggest mystery in modern astronomy: cosmic acceleration. The universe was already expanding as a result of the big bang, but astronomers expected it to slow down over time. Instead, it’s speeding up!

The universe’s expansion makes it tricky to talk about the distances of the farthest objects. We often use lookback time, which is the amount of time it took for an object’s light to reach us. That’s simpler than using a literal distance, because an object that was 10 billion light-years away when it emitted the light we received from it would actually be more than 16 billion light-years away right now, due to the expansion of space. We can even see objects that are presently over 30 billion light-years from Earth, even though the universe is only about 14 billion years old.

This James Webb Space Telescope image shines with the light from galaxies that are more than 13.4 billion years old, dating back to less than 400 million years after the big bang.

Our James Webb Space Telescope has helped us time travel back more than 13.4 billion years, to when the universe was less than 400 million years old. When our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in a few years, astronomers will pair its vast view of space with Webb’s zooming capabilities to study the early universe in better ways than ever before. And don’t worry – these telescopes will make plenty of pit stops along the way at other exciting cosmic destinations across space and time.

Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on X and Facebook.

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Love Letters from Space

Love is in the air, and it’s out in space too! The universe is full of amazing chemistry, cosmic couples held together by gravitational attraction, and stars pulsing like beating hearts.

Celestial objects send out messages we can detect if we know how to listen for them. Our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us scour the skies for all kinds of star-crossed signals.

Celestial Conversation Hearts

Communication is key for any relationship – including our relationship with space. Different telescopes are tuned to pick up different messages from across the universe, and combining them helps us learn even more. Roman is designed to see some visible light – the type of light our eyes can see, featured in the photo above from a ground-based telescope – in addition to longer wavelengths, called infrared. That will help us peer through clouds of dust and across immense stretches of space.

Other telescopes can see different types of light, and some detectors can even help us study cosmic rays, ghostly neutrinos, and ripples in space called gravitational waves.

Intergalactic Hugs

This visible and near-infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures two hearts locked in a cosmic embrace. Known as the Antennae Galaxies, this pair’s love burns bright. The two spiral galaxies are merging together, igniting the birth of brand new baby stars.

Stellar nurseries are often very dusty places, which can make it hard to tell what’s going on. But since Roman can peer through dust, it will help us see stars in their infancy. And Roman’s large view of space coupled with its sharp, deep imaging will help us study how galaxy mergers have evolved since the early universe.

Cosmic Chemistry

Those stars are destined to create new chemistry, forging elements and scattering them into space as they live, die, and merge together. Roman will help us understand the cosmic era when stars first began forming. The mission will help scientists learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies.

Did you know that U and I (uranium and iodine) were both made from merging neutron stars? Speaking of which…

Fatal Attraction

When two neutron stars come together in a marriage of sorts, it creates some spectacular fireworks! While they start out as stellar sweethearts, these and some other types of cosmic couples are fated for devastating breakups.

When a white dwarf – the leftover core from a Sun-like star that ran out of fuel – steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance and lead to a cataclysmic explosion. Studying these outbursts, called type Ia supernovae, led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Roman will scan the skies for these exploding stars to help us figure out what’s causing the expansion to accelerate – a mystery known as dark energy.

Going Solo

Plenty of things in our galaxy are single, including hundreds of millions of stellar-mass black holes and trillions of “rogue” planets. These objects are effectively invisible – dark objects lost in the inky void of space – but Roman will see them thanks to wrinkles in space-time.

Anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time. So when an intervening object nearly aligns with a background star from our vantage point, light from the star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer object. The object acts like a natural lens, focusing and amplifying the background star’s light.

Thanks to this observational effect, which makes stars appear to temporarily pulse brighter, Roman will reveal all kinds of things we’d never be able to see otherwise.

Roman is nearly ready to set its sights on so many celestial spectacles. Follow along with the mission’s build progress in this interactive virtual tour of the observatory, and check out these space-themed Valentine’s Day cards.

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Space Missions Come Together in Colorado

Our leadership hit the road to visit our commercial partners Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Ball Aerospace in Colorado. They were able to check the status of flight hardware, mission operations and even test virtual reality simulations that help these companies build spacecraft parts.

Let’s take a look at all the cool technology they got to see…

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor building our Orion crew vehicle, the only spacecraft designed to take humans into deep space farther than they’ve ever gone before.

Acting NASA Deputy Administrator Lesa Roe and Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot are seen inside the CHIL…the Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colo. Lockheed Martin’s CHIL enables collaboration between spacecraft design and manufacturing teams before physically producing hardware.

Cool shades! The ability to visualize engineering designs in virtual reality offers tremendous savings in time and money compared to using physical prototypes. Technicians can practice how to assemble and install components, the shop floor can validate tooling and work platform designs, and engineers can visualize performance characteristics like thermal, stress and aerodynamics, just like they are looking at the real thing.

This heat shield, which was used as a test article for the Mars Curiosity Rover, will now be used as the flight heat shield for the Mars 2020 rover mission.

Fun fact: Lockheed Martin has built every Mars heat shield and aeroshell for us since the Viking missions in 1976.

Here you can see Lockheed Martin’s Mission Support Area. Engineers in this room support six of our robotic planetary spacecraft: Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, Juno, OSIRIS-REx and Spitzer, which recently revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star, TRAPPIST-1. They work with NASA centers and the mission science teams to develop and send commands and monitor the health of the spacecraft.

See all the pictures from the Lockheed Martin visit HERE. 

Sierra Nevada Corporation

Next, Lightfoot and Roe went to Sierra Nevada Corporation in Louisville, Colo. to get an update about its Dream Chaser vehicle. This spacecraft will take cargo to and from the International Space Station as part of our commercial cargo program.

Here, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Vice President of Space Exploration Systems Steve Lindsey (who is also a former test pilot and astronaut!) speaks with Lightfoot and Roe about the Dream Chaser Space System simulator.

Lightfoot climbed inside the Dream Chaser simulator where he “flew” the crew version of the spacecraft to a safe landing. This mock-up facility enables approach-and-landing simulations as well as other real-life situations. 

See all the images from the Sierra Nevada visit HERE.

Ball Aerospace

Lightfoot and Roe went over to Ball Aerospace to tour its facility. Ball is another one of our commercial aerospace partners and helps builds instruments that are on NASA spacecraft throughout the universe, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Ball designed and built the advanced optical technology and lightweight mirror system that will enable the James Webb Space Telescope to look 13.5 billion years back in time. 

Looking into the clean room at Ball Aerospace’s facility in Boulder, Colo., the team can see the Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite. These sensors are used on spacecraft to track ozone measurements.

Here, the group stands in front of a thermal vacuum chamber used to test satellite optics. The Operation Land Imager-2 is being built for Landsat 9, a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that will continue the Landsat Program’s 40-year data record monitoring the Earth’s landscapes from space.

See all the pictures from the Ball Aerospace visit HERE. 

We recently marked a decade since a new era began in commercial spaceflight development for low-Earth orbit transportation. We inked agreements in 2006 to develop rockets and spacecraft capable of carrying cargo such as experiments and supplies to and from the International Space Station. Learn more about commercial space HERE.

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We’re honored that New Horizon’s image of Pluto was recognized as one of 2015’s top 10 photos by @timemagazine. 

TIME’s Top 10 Photos of 2015. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Each photograph, carefully culled from thousands and presented here unranked, reflects a unique and powerful point of view that represents the best of photojournalism this year. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 2015 gave us the ever picture of Pluto, made by @NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. The high-resolution color image was taken more than nine years after the two cameras that shot it left Earth in the fastest spacecraft ever launched into space. “This is really the completion of a 50-year quest to explore all of the planets in our solar system,” says photographer Alan Stern (@alanstern). “NASA began under President Kennedy and finished under President Obama. I believe that 100 years from now, this image will be an icon from the year 2015.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Read more from each #photographer at time.lightbox.com. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #topten #bestof2015 #pluto #space http://ift.tt/1O7fKGW

TESS’s first-year of planet-hunting was out of this world

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered ... what other kinds of planets are out there? Our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) just spent its first year bringing us a step closer to exploring the planets around the nearest and brightest stars in the southern sky and is now doing the same in the north.

TESS has been looking for dips in the brightness of stars that could be a sign of something we call “transits.” A transit happens when a planet passes between its star and us. It’s like when a bug flies in front of a light bulb. You may not notice the tiny drop in brightness when the bug blocks some of the light from reaching your eyes, but a sensitive camera could. The cameras on TESS are designed to detect those tiny drops in starlight caused by a transiting planet many light-years away.

In the last year TESS has found 24 planets and more than 900 new candidate planets. And TESS is only halfway through its goal of mapping over three-fourths of our skies, which means there’s plenty more to discover!

TESS has been looking for planets around the closest, brightest stars because they will be the best planets to explore more thoroughly with future missions. We can even see a few of these stars with our own eyes, which means we’ve been looking at these planets for millions of years and didn’t even know it.

We spent thousands of years staring at our closest neighbor, the Moon, and asking questions: What is it like? Could we live there? What is it made of (perhaps cheese?). Of course, now we can travel to the Moon and explore it ourselves (turns out, not made of cheese).

But for the worlds TESS is discovering, the commute to answer those questions would be killer. It took 35 years for Voyager 1 to cross into interstellar space (the region between stars), and it’s zipping along at over 38,000 mph! At that rate it would take more than a half-a-million years to reach the nearest stars and planets that TESS is discovering.

While exploring these distant worlds in person isn’t an option, we have other ways of learning what they are like. TESS can tell us where a planet is, its size and its overall temperature, but observatories on the ground and in space like our upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to learn even more — like whether or not a planet has an atmosphere and what it’s made of.

Here are a few of the worlds that our planet hunter discovered in the last year.

Earth-Sized Planet

The first Earth-sized planet discovered by TESS is about 90% the size of our home planet and orbits a star 53 light-years away. The planet is called HD 21749 c (what a mouthful!) and is actually the second planet TESS has discovered orbiting that star, which you can see in the southern constellation Reticulum.

The planet may be Earth-sized, but it would not be a pleasant place to live. It’s very close to its star and could have a surface temperature of 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be like sitting inside a commercial pizza oven.

Water World?

The other planet discovered in that star system, HD 21749 b, is about three times Earth’s size and orbits the star every 36 days. It has the longest orbit of any planet within 100 light-years of our solar system detected with TESS so far.

The planet is denser than Neptune, but isn’t made of rock. Scientists think it might be a water planet or have a totally new type of atmosphere. But because the planet isn’t ideal for follow-up study, for now we can only theorize what the planet is actually like. Could it be made of pudding? Maybe … but probably not.

Magma World

One of the first planets TESS discovered, called LHS 3844 b, is roughly Earth’s size, but is so close to its star that it orbits in just 11 hours. For reference, Mercury, which is more than two and a half times closer to the Sun than we are, completes an orbit in just under three months.

Because the planet is so close to its star, the day side of the planet might get so hot that pools and oceans of magma form on its rocky surface, which would make for a rather unpleasant day at the beach.    

TESS’s Smallest Planet

The smallest planet TESS has discovered, called L 98-59 b, is between the size of Earth and Mars and orbits its star in a little over two days. Its star also hosts two other TESS-discovered worlds.

Because the planet lies so close to its star, it gets 22 times the radiation we get here on Earth. Yikes! It is also not located in its star’s habitable zone, which means there probably isn’t any liquid water on the surface. Those two factors make it an unlikely place to find life, but scientists believe it will be a good candidate for follow-up studies by other telescopes.

Other Data

While TESS’s team is hunting for planets around close, bright stars, it’s also collecting information on all sorts of other things. From transits around dimmer, farther stars to other objects in our solar system and events outside our galaxy, data from TESS can help astronomers learn a lot more about the universe. Comets and black holes and supernovae, oh my!

Interested in joining the hunt? TESS’s data are released online, so citizen scientists around the world can help us discover new worlds and better understand our universe.

Stay tuned for TESS’s next year of science as it monitors the stars that more than 6.5 billion of us in the northern hemisphere see every night.

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