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NASA's newest planet-hunting telescope is officially at work. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is designed to hunt for alien worlds around stars not too far from the sun, began gathering science data Wednesday (July 25), members of the instrument team announced yesterday (July 27). TESS will send that initial data to Earth in August, with new observations arriving every 13.5 days after that, mission team members said in a statement. "I'm thrilled that our planet hunter is ready to start combing the backyard of our solar system for new worlds," Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics division, said...

Planet-hunting scientists were dealt a major blow Wednesday when NASA officials announced that a crucial wheel on the Kepler space telescope had ceased to function and that the craft had been placed in safe mode. Even as NASA officials raised the possibility that they could get the telescope back up and running, scientists began mourning the potential loss of a spacecraft that they said had fundamentally altered our understanding of alien planets in the Milky Way—and Earth’s place in an increasingly crowded galaxy. “Tears are coming to my eyes on and off,” said UC Berkeley astrophysicist Geoff Marcy, a co-investigator...

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size of Mars. All three planets are thought to be rocky like Earth but orbit close to their star, making them too hot to be in the habitable zone, which is the region where liquid water could exist. Of the more than 700 planets confirmed to orbit other stars, called exoplanets, only a handful are...

The space telescope Kepler blasted into orbit last Friday with a simple mission: Find another Earth. Or, in the best of all possible worlds, so to speak, a lot more Earths. Since 1995, when the first extra-solar planet was discovered, after centuries of searching and an uneasy sense that there might not be any, astronomers have discovered more than 300 planets beyond our solar system. The problem is that they were Jupiter-like gas giants orbiting rapidly and close to their stars. Now, with the aid of Kepler, astronomers hope to find rocky, smaller planets orbiting their stars in the "Goldilocks...