Ending a three-year competition, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has selected a planet-observing satellite developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more commonly known as MIT, to be launched into space in 2017.
The space agency announced the mission will be funded through a $200 million grant.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) project, led by George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, will use several wide-field cameras to survey the skies for so-called transiting exoplanets --- planets in other solar systems that can be detected as they pass between the stars they are orbiting and Earth.
"TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission," Ricker said. "It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth."
Through TESS, it will be possible for scientists to study the masses, sizes, densities, orbits and atmospheres of a large number of small planets --- including a sampling of rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.
That project's survey will identify main targets to be further studied through other ground-based and spaced based telescopes, in particular the James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared telescope considered the successor to both the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and set space launch in 2018.
"The selection of TESS has just accelerated our chances of finding life on another planet within the next decade," said Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and physics at MIT.
The TESS project was selected through NASA's Explorer contest, the space agency's oldest continuous program, which is designed to provide frequent, low-cost access to space for space science investigations focused on the universe in general or the Sun in particular.
The Explorer program has launched more than 90 missions, starting back in 1958 with Explorer 1, the nation's first orbiting satellite.
"The Explorer Program has a long and stellar history of deploying truly innovative missions to study some of the most exciting questions in space science," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "With these missions we will learn about the most extreme states of matter by studying neutron stars and we will identify many nearby star systems with rocky planets in the habitable zone for further study by telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope."
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