Harvard’s David Latham on the scope of TESS
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April. After calibration and testing of instruments, the telescope will train its cameras on Earth’s stellar neighborhood and begin its primary task of scanning for Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars. As TESS science program director, David Latham, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), will oversee follow-up studies of planet candidates. Q&A David Latham GAZETTE: TESS launched in April. Has there been a definitive date set for the start of the science mission, or is it the kind of thing that you ease into? LATHAM: We are in what’s called “commissioning,” or calibrating the performance of the cameras on the TESS spacecraft. We’re adjusting the way the fine-pointing of the spacecraft works, so that we get sharp images. To see the first images coming down and see that the optics are working, the cameras are working — it’s pretty damn exciting. And short exposures look great....