NASA WISE: Mysteries of 'Interstellar' Space revealed

This enormous mosaic of the Milky Way galaxy from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), shows dozens of dense clouds, called nebulae. 

Many nebulae seen here are places where new stars are forming, creating bubble like structures that can be dozens to hundreds of light-years in size.

Image Credit: NASA

The new Paramount film "Interstellar" imagines a future where astronauts must find a new planet suitable for human life after climate change destroys the Earth's ability to sustain us.

Multiple NASA missions are helping avoid this dystopian future by providing critical data necessary to protect Earth.

Yet the cosmos beckons us to explore farther from home, expanding human presence deeper into the solar system and beyond.

For thousands of years we've wondered if we could find another home among the stars. We're right on the cusp of answering that question.

If you step outside on a very dark night you may be lucky enough to see many of the 2,000 stars visible to the human eye.

They're but a fraction of the billions of stars in our galaxy and the innumerable galaxies surrounding us.

Multiple NASA missions are helping us extend humanity's senses and capture starlight to help us better understand our place in the universe.

Largely visible light telescopes like Hubble show us the ancient light permeating the cosmos, leading to groundbreaking discoveries like the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Through infrared missions like Spitzer, SOFIA and WISE, we've peered deeply through cosmic dust, into stellar nurseries where gases form new stars.

With missions like Chandra, Fermi and NuSTAR, we've detected the death throes of massive stars, which can release enormous energy through supernovas and form the exotic phenomenon of black holes.

Yet it was only in the last few years that we could fully grasp how many other planets there might be beyond our solar system.

Some 64 million miles (104 kilometers) from Earth, the Kepler Space Telescope stared at a small window of the sky for four years.

As planets passed in front of a star in Kepler's line of view, the spacecraft measured the change in brightness.

Kepler was designed to determine the likelihood that other planets orbit stars. Because of the mission, we now know it's possible every star has at least one planet.

Solar systems surround us in our galaxy and are strewn throughout the myriad galaxies we see.

Though we have not yet found a planet exactly like Earth, the implications of the Kepler findings are staggering, there may very well be many worlds much like our own for future generations to explore.

NASA also is developing its next exoplanet mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will search 200,000 nearby stars for the presence of Earth-size planets.



The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky.

In a two-year survey of the solar neighbourhood, TESS will monitor more than 500,000 stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits.

This first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, around a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances. No ground-based survey can achieve this feat.

NASA TESS: Exoplanet Mission to Hunt Down Earth-sized Worlds

Set to launch in 2017, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will monitor more than half a million stars over its two-year mission, with a focus on the smallest, brightest stellar objects.

During its observations, TESS is expected to find more than 3,000 new planets outside of our solar system, most of which will be possible for ground-based telescopes to observe.

"Bright host stars are the best ones for follow-up studies of their exoplanets to pin down planet masses, and to characterize planet atmospheres," said TESS principal investigator George Ricker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics.

"TESS should be able to find over 200 Earths and super-Earths, defined as being twice the size of Earth," said Peter Sullivan, a physics doctoral student at MIT.

"Ten to 20 of those are habitable-zone planets.”

Sullivan, who works with Ricker on TESS, led an analysis of the number of planets TESS would likely find based on the number and types of planets found by NASA's Kepler mission.

Kepler focused on a single region of the sky and studied all transiting planets within it.

TESS, on the other hand, will examine almost the entire sky over its two-year mission, but capture only the brightest stars, many of which are expected to host terrestrial planets.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is scheduled to launch in 2017 to hunt for Earth-size alien worlds.

Credit: MIT KAVLI Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research

TESS will travel around Earth in a highly elliptical orbit that will range as distant as the moon.

Along the way, it will use four cameras to observe a swatch of sky running from the celestial equator to the poles.

TESS will observe each swatch for approximately a month before switching to the next region.



Courtney Dressing, a doctoral student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, compares the satellite's observations to peeling an apple in vertical cuts that overlap near the stem.

Because of the overlap, stars near the pole will be observed for more than 100 days, while stars near the equator will be observed for only 27 days.

Dressing worked on a second model, based on Sullivan's work, that predicts the number of planets near Earth that pass between the sun and their host star.

"We predicted there should be about 100 transiting planets within 20 parsecs [about 65 light-years], and that roughly three of them should lie within the habitable zone of their host stars," Dressing said.

Not all of these planets will be detectable to the TESS mission. According to Dressing, the new telescope will be most sensitive to small planets orbiting stars 20 to 50 percent the size of our sun.

NASA TESS: Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite spacecraft to identify Exoplanets

An artist rendering of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft, to be launched in 2017. 

The TESS mission's primary goal would be to identify terrestrial planets orbiting nearby stars. 

NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program has selected the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission to fly in 2017.

TESS will follow in the footsteps of NASA's pioneering Kepler Mission, continuing the groundbreaking work of discovering Earth-size exoplanets.

NASA selected TESS and another explorer mission after a competition that evaluated proposals for the best scientific value and most feasible development plans.

TESS will use an array of four telescopes to perform an all-sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets of all sizes in orbit around the nearest and brightest stars in the sky.

Its goal is to identify terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars that are best suited for extensive follow up observations and characterization.

TESS will collect 10 times as much data during its two-year mission as Kepler did during its first two years.

Jon M. Jenkins

SETI Institute scientist Jon M. Jenkins, co-investigator for data processing for both TESS and Kepler, will lead the development, design and operations of the TESS Data Processing Group (DPG) at NASA Ames Research Center.

The DPG will process the raw pixel data downlinked by TESS to detect the minuscule signatures of transiting exoplanets.

The DPG team will leverage the experience of the Science Operations Center of the Kepler Mission to develop a data processing facility that meets the rigorous requirements of the TESS mission at a low cost.

"It's extremely exciting to learn that the profound voyage of discovery that Kepler began in 2009 will continue with a mission to discover Earth's closest cousins," said Jon Jenkins.

Most exoplanets discovered by Kepler are hundreds of lights years from Earth.