#Solar walk for computer pro#

#Solar walk for computer pro#

While Seager says this is not as much data as people might expect (a 2019 Macbook Pro has up to 512 gigabytes of storage), analyzing the data involves taking many complex factors into consideration. Seager says every two weeks, which is how long it takes the satellite to orbit the Earth, TESS sends about 350 gigabytes of data (once uncompressed) to Earth. TESS is collecting images of more than 200,000 distant stars, saving an image of these planets every two minutes, as well as saving an image of a large swath of sky every 30 minutes. While TESS has enabled some impressive discoveries so far, finding these exoplanets is no simple task. “TESS found over 1,000 planet candidates and about 20 confirmed planets, some in multiple-planet systems.” “TESS just completed the first of its two-year prime mission, surveying the southern night sky,” says Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT and deputy director of science for TESS. This work, which is now halfway complete, will reveal more about the other planets within what NASA calls our “solar neighborhood.”

These images can help researchers find planets orbiting stars beyond our sun, called exoplanets. Launched from Cape Canaveral in April 2018, TESS is a satellite that takes images of the sky as it orbits the Earth. Researchers are already expanding beyond traditional applications of computer science and using these techniques to advance a range of scientific fields, from cancer medicine to anthropology to design - and to the discovery of new planets.Ĭomputation has already proven useful for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a NASA-funded mission led by MIT. Schwarzman College of Computing this fall, one of the goals was to drive further innovation in computing across all of MIT’s schools.