NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is set to launch this evening at 6:32 p.m. on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral. The TESS mission is to find planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets. It finds them by looking at faraway stars, or more specifically by brief dimming periods on other stars caused by planets periodically blocking part of the light as they pass by, or transit, them. We're joined by Dr. Derek Buzasi, he's a Whitaker Eminent Scholar in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Florida Gulf Coast University. He'll get to use TESS to further research he began in the 1990s exploring starquakes.
If you’d like to learn more about the search for exoplanets, check out this conversation we had on this show last month with the Deputy Director of the Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
