Paul Hertz, Astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters.

Mike McAleenan, weather officer with the U.S.

Jeff Volosin, TESS project manager at Goddard.

Omar Baez, launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program.

Sandra Connelly, deputy associate administrator of programs for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Elisa Quintana, TESS scientist at Goddard.

Jessie Christiansen, staff scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.

Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX.

Robert Lockwood, TESS spacecraft program manager with Orbital ATK.

Natalia Guerrero, TESS researcher at MIT.

Zach Berta-Thompson, assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Jenn Burt, Torres postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT).

Tom Barclay, TESS scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Martin Still, TESS program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

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. The mission is expected to catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. 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.

Prelaunch mission coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website Sunday, April 15, with three live briefings. 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. 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. 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.

Spacex launches nasa planet-hunting s