NASA's TESS Mission Update

NASA’s Kepler mission breathtakingly revealed that our galaxy was filled with stars surrounded by planetary systems of all kinds. Our search for planets will not end with the Kepler mission, but will go on.

Join Tony Darnell, Alberto Conti, and Harley Thronson as they discuss 2018’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), with Drs. George Ricker (MIT) and Padi Boyd (NASA Goddard).

Future in Space Hangouts are endorsed by the American Astronomical Society and the American Astronautical Society.

TESS Website:
Cool TESS Video:
Deep Astronomy TESS Video

Alberto's Lego Link:

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[R.Instro]

Great discussion on a great topic. When George says the planned orbit gives TESS a "23 dB advantage" over an Earth-Sun L2 orbit, what that means in plain English is that the signal from TESS will be ~200x stronger in the planned orbit versus what it would be out at that much larger distance from Earth. As units, "decibels" (dB) are a relative, logarithmic scale where an increase of 3 dB = a doubling (2x) in strength, while a 3 dB decrease = a halving (1/2x) of strength.

23 dB = (3 dB x 7) x (2 dB)
= (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2) x (~1.5)
= ~190-ish times stronger signal

[nathanroberson]

Another fantastic talk! Tony your the best.

[xJoxer]

Should we not focus on the yellow dwarfs? These are the most promising stars. Red dwarfs are probably not life-friendly.

This hangouts are so cool, hands down the best content on youtube :D

[nickhardy]

Thank you for this great stream again, Tony.
Could you ask Alberto if the JWST clock hanging behind him is for sale anywhere.
I'd love to buy one. Thx.

[LateNightHacks]

Cool stuff Tony, I rarely can catch you live with Australia's timezone, but I'm always following your stuff.
The few primary things that you have going for you that others often lack is
A- Your content is direct from the tap. you do good job of fact checking, and avoiding pseudoscience crap. and refusing to engage that kind of subjects.
B- You rarely do science aggregation, you bring in actual scientist (specially teams) from the hottest ongoing research topics. I highly value that aspect.
C- Not only you have great guests, you also have great hosts as well, actual insiders in the field.
D- The content has a rough and ready charm, it's not a "production", it's like actually sitting around the table with a bunch of cool people and enjoy the chaotic excitement of people talking about their passion and progress.
E- Your content has some depth to it (honestly I would ask for more depth but alas..). nothing bugs me more than 1 minute or less videos that a lot of science channels are doing nowadays. a third of it is intro and outtro, and rather exceptionally shallow content. I have taken into the habit of opening links and looking at the video lenght first, if it's under 10-15 minutes, it's unlikely I would play it at all.