A satellite made to find Earth like planets is funded by NASA
A press release from NASA a few days ago, revealed that a satellite made to track planets will be one of the projects that NASA will fund. The Satellite is called TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and was proposed by MIT researchers for the search of habitable planets out there.
The method that will be used will be similar to the Kepler telescope , however TESS will be able to scan a larger number of planets but not as far as the Kepler telescope can. It is like comparing a zoom lens with a wide lens.
The proposal for TESS was selected for evaluation in 11/2011 and was finally selected for a fund of 200 million dollars recently. The satellite will be launched in 2017.
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