In Kennedy Space Center's Press Site auditorium, members of the media participate in a mission briefing on NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, answers questions during the briefing. TESS is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. The satellite will survey the nearest and brightest stars for two years to search for transiting exoplanets. TESS will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT on Monday, April 16.
TESSTransiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite2018 LaunchesNASAGSFCGoddard Space Flight CenterLSPLaunch Services ProgramKSCKennedy Space CenterSpaceXFalcon 9SLC-40CCAFSCape Canaveral Air Force StationOrbital ATKLEOStar-2MITMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyMIT Lincoln LaboratoryMKIKavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space ResearchARCNASA s Ames Research CenterSAOHarvard-Smithsonian Center for AstrophysicsSTScISpace Telescope Science InstituteWide Field of View CCD Cameras