NASA has successfully completed their first downlink from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The data will be shared with hundreds of scientists who will begin work on examining and verifying data collected by the satellite.
TESS is capable of 100 MiB/s downlinks through its Ka-band antenna. Downlinks are performed to the Deep Space Network every two weeks when the satellite is at its nearest point to Earth. The first downlink took 1.25 hours and collected 53 gigabytes of scientific data. The success of the first downlink was announced on the official NASA TESS account.
TESS Mission Update: Successfully downlinked through @NASASCaN #DSN the first 2 weeks of @NASA_TESS science data! Downlink of a full orbit took ~1.25 hours to dump ~53GB of data.
— NASA_TESS (@NASA_TESS) August 8, 2018
TESS began science operations on July 25, 2018 after completing a battery of tests. Over its two-year primary mission, TESS will perform wide and shallow-field surveys of nearly 85% of the sky with a range of up to 300 light years. Scientist expect the satellite to identify thousands of potential alien planets. Once a possible planet has been identified, researchers will utilise ground-based and space telescopes to validate the findings. Work on the data collected by TESS is expected.
. The 1.25-hour downlink collected 53GB of data.){kind=link}