NASA’s TESS – Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission has apparently been moved from its originally planned Orbital Sciences Corp Pegasus XL air dropped launch vehicle to a Falcon 9v1.1 launch supplied by SpaceX. That launch was apparently supplied as part of the construction contract with Orbital Sciences Corp. The new Falcon 9 launch is planned for August 2017 and will take place from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The total cost for NASA to launch TESS is approximately $87 million, which includes the launch service, spacecraft processing, payload integration, tracking, data and telemetry, and other launch support requirements.
TESS will carry for wide-angle telescopes and use wide-field cameras to watch for attenuation in stellar brightness which can indicate the presence of a planet. Dips in brightness can happen when a planet transits the disk of a star.
Comment by David Todd: The cause of this change is not disclosed. NASA still has confidence in the rarely flown Pegasus XL and has selected it for the launch of its ICON mission.
