The search for worlds circling stars far beyond our solar system will resume in the coming weeks with NASA's launch of a spacecraft scientists hope will enlarge the known catalog of so-called exoplanets believed capable of supporting life.
NASA plans to send the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set for blastoff between April 16 and June on a two-year, $337 million mission.
The latest NASA astrophysics endeavor is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,500 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years, revolutionizing one of the newest fields in space science.