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Raumfahrt - Erfolgreicher Start von Falcon-9 mit Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)-Update-2

9.04.2018

Going inside NASA’s Clean Room for a rare look at a SpaceX payload

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NASA invited media to a very special opportunity to go inside their Clean Room at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is where satellites are meticulously prepared in the weeks leading up to their scheduled launch date. Of course, I was there, I wouldn’t miss this for the world!

The Press Accreditation Office is an unassuming building that’s located off the beaten path and a few miles outside KSC gates. It’s a convenient location for a large gathering of people that need to avoid traffic congestion. The building itself looks like an abandoned gas station without pumps, mostly vacant inside, except for a couple of tables and bathrooms. There’s really nothing inside – not even a coffee maker (I’m shocked by this). It serves it’s purpose perfectly though – get media personnel checked in and loaded onto a bus, quickly.

I was anxious to go inside NASA’s Clean Room and catch a glimpse of SpaceX’s upcoming payload.

The payload and our Solar System’s latest remote camera is called ‘TESS’ – The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Technically speaking, it is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission designed to perform an all-sky survey to detect transiting planets around the closest brightest stars by monitoring their brightness with high precision. Simply put, it’s a satellite containing four insanely great cameras that will photograph the sky and detect planets around nearby stars!

After passing through the usual K-9 unit sniff test, I boarded a NASA bus and was taken through parts of the Kennedy Space Center that you don’t ever see while on the standard tour. We were traveling through heavily wooded back-of-the-property roads and for good reason. We were going to NASA’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility.

We were first escorted into the conference room, which is separated from the building containing the Clean Room. A bunch of swag-bags for press were being handed out, one for each of us, as we walked inside. The room was furnished with a large board-table with a huge flat-screen TV attached to the wall at the head of the table. Hanging on the walls were stunning high-resolution black and white prints of planets and moons, the same ones you’ve seen on the internet, evenly separated and precisely level. TESS mission experts were sitting at the table waiting for us to take our seats. As I sat down, I noticed some hardware on the table that we would soon be able to get our hands on.

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MIT’s George Ricker – TESS’ Principal Investigator promptly started his lecture about the details of the satellite and the mission. This would be my first MIT-level lecture and I was absolutely captivated because it was organized and explained logically. George is an excellent teacher, very articulate in his descriptions of everything and had the help of great animations on the screen.

You know that scene in Interstellar where the main characters stumble into ‘NASA’ and they’re given a lecture on the ‘anomaly’ that was discovered in our solar system? That’s the scene here, except this was reality – we are discovering distant planets around other Sun’s.

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The scene from Interstellar that resembled the TESS lecture.
(Screencap credit : Nolan, C., Nolan, J., Thomas, E., Obst, L. R., McConaughey, M., Hathaway, A., Chastain, J., … Warner Home Video (Firm),. (2015). Interstellar.

There are a ton of impressive features of TESS that I can hardly pick a favorite to tell you about. It has four custom-made high-resolution cameras. The CCD’s (camera sensors) are the largest and most perfect sensors that have ever been developed for a spacecraft. The experts, luckily, had one extra sensor to pass around for us to get a hands-off, drool-worthy close-up look. If you know about full frame 35mm sensors – get a load of this one!

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TESS camera custom-made CCD wafer full-size. (Photo/TomCross)

Next up was one of the extra lens-elements that are inside each of the four cameras. I keep a lens cloth in my pocket so once I received it I gave it a soft wipe-down and captured a few iPhone pictures of the different refections in the lens coating. I’m still hoping for an answer about what this lens is coated with but I may never find out, though. But isn’t it intriguing?

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Perhaps my favorite part of the lecture was learning about how they’re getting this satellite into orbit. This is where orbital dynamics becomes a bit like mixed martial arts with Newton’s laws of motion.

TESS is launching aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 with a very slim window of opportunity – about 1 minute per day because it has to be perfectly in sync with the orbit of our Moon. As George Ricker explained, “This is a type of orbit that is normally unstable. If you aren’t careful about the way you launch into this orbit, you’re almost guaranteed to hit the Moon within four years. So, there’s a delicate balance staying in this orbit and there’s been a lot of effort that has gone into figuring it out. If you actually manage to do this, it’s stable for decades!”

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TESS’ orbit outline. (Photo from TESS PDF file)

After transporting into space from Cape Canaveral, via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the satellite is going to orbit Earth three times, and during each of it’s closest approaches, the satellite’s hydrazine propulsion system is going to propel it faster, essentially pumping the orbit farther out until it reaches the distance of the Moon. They timed this approach perfectly so that TESS does a ‘lunar flyby’ that will swoop beneath the Moon and use its gravity to speed-up the spacecraft and change its inclination from an East to West orbit to a new North to South orbit the will travel above and below Earth and Moon.

The reason this orbit is so elegantly chosen is that there are 300-hours of unbroken observations for photography, almost non-existent Earth-Moon light pollution. The lens hoods, also, don’t have to deal with much light or toxic radiation levels that will often destroy electronics, thus being able to remain in this orbit for several decades without any help. Absolutely awesome.

So, let’s go see TESS in the clean room.

I was transported to a very tall building and put into a small group to get dressed into bunny-suits before entering the high-bay, Clean Room. They take ‘clean’ seriously. Before stepping into the dressing room, I was escorted to a shoe scrubbing machine that had large scrubby-wheels and a vacuum to capture the particles. Then, to another device that automatically put booties on my shoes.

As I walked into the clean room, there was a sticky doormat that grabbed any particles off my booties that I picked up on the way in. I was quickly fitted with a bunny suit “You look like a large, here you go,” said a facility employee while handing me a sealed bag with a clean suit inside. We were shown how to put the suit on. Then, we went over to the glove dispensary to be sized. I noticed that their gloves were incorrectly labeled S, M, and L, according to NASA lore. I asked the employees, “Do you know about the issue this caused with the condom sizes astronauts chose?” They did not. So I was able to teach the workers a fun-fact about astronauts.

See, astronauts have egos, all of them contain the ‘Right Stuff’ but not all of them wear the same sized condoms for their spacesuit urine bags. All astronauts chose ‘Large’, not wanting to hurt their egos. Sometimes their urine condoms leaked into their spacesuit so NASA came up with a brilliant plan: Change the names of the condoms from Small, Medium, and Large to Large, Huge, and Gigantic so that all astronauts chose their appropriate sizes. It worked! But, in this case, the gloves were not labeled this way. Of course, I asked for Large. The room burst into laughter.

An employee handed me an alcohol-soaked microfiber cloth and told me to wipe down my gear perfectly before going to the next cleaning-station. This was followed by a visit to an ‘Air Shower’. It’s literally what it sounds like. There’s a small rectangular-shaped room with nozzles on the ceiling and walls that eject high-powered air all over our body. Vents in the floor sucked particles through a filter. After this final cleanse, we were checked with a blacklight … ok, just kidding. After the air shower we were granted access to the room that TESS was located: NASA’s high-bay!

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The air shower entrance-exit to the clean room. (Photo/TomCross)

The room was absolutely drenched in disorienting orange sodium lighting – a nightmare to deal with for photography and white balance but TESS was in its own protected E.T. style clean area beneath bright fluorescent lights.

In the limited time available, we were able to interview satellite experts and take as many photos as we could while technicians worked on the satellite. I love hardware images, so I set up my tripod and used my Miops Mobile remote to photograph detailed close-ups of the intricate components.

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Wide angle image of the high-bay, TESS inside it’s own clean-room. (Photo/TomCross)

I was politely warned to not take any photographs of the hardware surrounding the satellite and keep my lens pointed only at the satellite in order to not accidentally capture something I’m not supposed to. I was very respectful and got some incredible images of things you typically will never see unless you worked on it yourself.

The spacecraft itself is quite small, there’ll be plenty of room remaining in the Falcon 9 fairing.

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It’s not often I get to see a payload inside a NASA Clean Room. These are always incredible experiences.

Frequently, a mission’s importance is diminished by the fact that we’re unable to see what’s going to space and what its purpose is, mainly weather and communications satellites. They often have state-of-the-art technology on board, which is likely the reason why they want to keep it under wraps. I’m really looking forward to photographing this launch in April now that I have actually seen the payload in person.

After my time was up photographing TESS, I changed out of the bunny-suit and was brought back to the Accreditation Office. I wasted no time getting on my way to see Falcon Heavy’s Side Booster that was temporarily on display at Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Center.

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A beautiful sunset eclipsed by SpaceX’s equally beautiful flight-proven Falcon Heavy booster. (Tom Cross/Teslarati)

Quelle: TESLARATI

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Update: 12.04.2018

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NASA Television to Air Launch of Next Planet-Hunting Mission

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NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida no earlier than April 16, 2018. Once in orbit, TESS will spend about two years surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for planets outside our solar system.
Credits: NASA

On a mission to detect planets outside of our solar system, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT Monday, April 16. Prelaunch mission coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website Sunday, April 15, with three live briefings.

 

TESS is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets, including those that could support life. The mission is expected to catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.

 

NASA TV coverage is as follows:

 

Sunday, April 15

 

11 a.m. – NASA Social Mission Overview

  • Martin Still, TESS program scientist at NASA Headquarters
  • Tom Barclay, TESS scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
  • Jenn Burt, Torres postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • Zach Berta-Thompson, assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder
  • Natalia Guerrero, TESS researcher at MIT
  • Robert Lockwood, TESS spacecraft program manager with Orbital ATK
  • Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX
  • Jessie Christiansen, staff scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech
  • Elisa Quintana, TESS scientist at Goddard

 

1 p.m. – Prelaunch news conference

  • Sandra Connelly, deputy associate administrator of programs for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
  • Omar Baez, launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program 
  • Jeff Volosin, TESS project manager at Goddard
  • Mike McAleenan, weather officer with the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron
  • Robert Lockwood
  • Hans Koenigsmann

 

3 p.m. – Science news conference

  • Paul Hertz, Astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters
  • George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at MIT
  • Padi Boyd, TESS Guest Investigator Program lead at Goddard
  • Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at Goddard
  • Diana Dragomir, postdoctoral fellow at MIT

 

Monday, April 16

 

10 a.m. – NASA EDGE: TESS     

  • This half-hour live show will discuss the TESS spacecraft, the science of searching for planets outside our solar system, and the launch from Cape Canaveral.

 

6 p.m. – Launch coverage begins

 

6:32 p.m. – Launch

 

TESS will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The deadline for media accreditation for this launch has passed.

Quelle: NASA

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Update: 14.04.2018 / 7.45 MESZ

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TESS Briefings and Events Scheduled for Sunday, April 15

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The payload fairing for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is being moved to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Inside the facility, TESS will be encapsulated in the payload fairing. Photo credit: NASA

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is making strides toward its upcoming liftoff. The planet-hunting spacecraft is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 on Monday, April 16, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.  Inside Kennedy Space Center’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, the TESS spacecraft was sealed within the Falcon 9 payload fairing in preparation for its move to the launch pad.

The satellite is the next step in NASA’s search for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Dr. George Ricker of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission. NASA’s Launch Services Program is responsible for launch management.

NASA’s TESS satellite is scheduled to launch Monday, April 16, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, on an ambitious mission to search for planets outside our solar system. Tune in Sunday for a series of briefings and events broadcast live on NASA TV.

Catch the NASA Social Mission Overview at 11 a.m., a prelaunch news conference at 1 p.m. and a news conference focusing on the science of the mission beginning at 3 p.m. All times are Eastern. View the TESS Briefings and Events page for the full list of event participants.

Join us here or at NASA TV from 6 to 8 p.m. on Monday for live coverage from the countdown. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 is scheduled for 6:32 p.m.

Quelle: NASA

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Update: 16.04.2018 / 7.35 MESZ

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NASA's TESS Mission Hopes to Find Exoplanets Beyond Our Solar System

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The worlds orbiting other stars are called “exoplanets,” and they come in a wide variety of sizes, from gas giants larger than Jupiter to small, rocky planets about as big around as Earth or Mars. This artist’s impression shows an exoplanet orbiting the Sun-like star HD 85512 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail).

This rocky super-Earth is an illustration of the type of planets future telescopes, like NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and James Webb, hope to find outside our solar system. TESS, slated to launch on April 16, 2018, is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets. 

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Quelle: NASA

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Update: 23.30 MESZ

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TESS Launch Now Targeted for Wednesday

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Launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional Guidance Navigation and Control analysis, and teams are now working towards a targeted launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18. The TESS spacecraft is in excellent health, and remains ready for launch. TESS will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Quelle: NASA

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Update: 17.04.2018

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TESS MISSION

 

 

SpaceX is targeting launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The 30-second launch window opens at 6:51 p.m. EDT, or 22:51 UTC. TESS will be deployed into a highly elliptical orbit approximately 48 minutes after launch.

Following stage separation, SpaceX will attempt to land Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic

Quelle: SpaceX

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Update: 19.04.2018

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Launch-Frams:

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Quelle: SpaceX

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